Perspectives on Innovation

We recently announced a Challenge with the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF) to improve sanitation and containment of waste during humanitarian responses to natural or man-made disasters. A solution to this Challenge would benefit thousands of people displaced by these disasters, often in already-vulnerable communities. We spoke recently with Nicolas Kröger, Manager of the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, about the Challenge and its potential impact. [Ed note: A press release of the Challenge announcement can be found here.]

Hello Nicolas.  There are clearly many immediate as well as long-term needs that people affected by disasters such as earthquakes or tsunamis have. Can you tell us why you decided to focus this Challenge on sanitation?

Hello, and thanks for the opportunity to discuss this important Challenge. When we first looked at the possibility of organizing a Challenge with InnoCentive, we were aware that we would have to leave out many of the needs that people affected by disasters have. As a result, we knew that whichever sector we decided to focus on as a first Challenge would have to be built around a broad consensus within the sector.

We thus decided to survey the humanitarian community and ask where they thought innovation was most needed in the system. Unsurprisingly, we received many answers, but most were high-level and outside the scope of the HIF and/or the Challenge we wanted to establish. However, from the top three sectors coming out of the survey, the more specific and tangible Challenges suggested were to be found in the WASH area. For example, the appropriate water treatment technologies for immediate relief phase, an emergency toilet ‘platform’ that enables adaptations that are culturally appropriate, hand hygiene technologies for emergencies, and so on.

A gap analysis that had been initiated by the WASH sector further suggested that while a lot of effort and resources were being put into water treatment, hand washing, sanitation and hygiene promotion have been proven to have a much bigger health impact. Sanitation therefore seemed to be a good place to start.

The Challenge mentions particular issues with providing latrines in urban environments.  Can you say more about the limitations and obstacles in these situations?

With more than half the world population now living in urban centers, and the trend moving upward, an increasing number of disasters will have an impact on urban contexts and populations. These pose specific challenges for humanitarians responding to a crisis. Up until now, most tools and approaches have been developed with rural areas in mind and they need to be rethought for urban areas which pose a distinct set of challenges.

Urban environments are not all properly planned and developed: about a third of the urban population is actually living in slums or informal settlements with poor or no existing sanitation services. In these usually crowded and confined areas, the lack of both adequate water supplies and proper sanitation (e.g., open drains, sewers) increase the risk of disease transmission. This necessitates rethinking the way we build latrines. Additionally, existing solutions don’t take into account the specific nature of urban centers with their hard-to-dig pavements and concrete which make the current pit latrine design impractical with regards to time and resource constraints following a disaster.

This is a Theoretical Challenge with a non-exclusive license.  Has the HIF thought about what it will do to develop and implement the winning solution? Read the rest of this entry »

By Dwayne Spradlin, InnoCentive CEO

LEARNINGS FROM THE BP OIL SPILL

As many of you know, the InnoCentive team and InnoCentive’s Global Solver Community mobilized quickly in the earliest days of the BP Oil Spill Crisis in order to drive ideas and solutions into the hands of emergency responders and British Petroleum. Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, we literally had calls out for solutions within days. And clearly our Global Solver Community stepped up to meet the challenge. Thousands of solutions were received from all over the world addressing technical solutions to the spill, approaches to recovering the oil, and remediating the environmental and human health impact. Their efforts were incredible and validate the potential of crowdsourcing and open innovation to provide solutions on demand in even the most challenging situations.

You may also recall, that after months of working with BP representatives, government officials, and others, it was clear that British Petroleum would not agree to coordinate efforts with InnoCentive. BP would not answer technical questions from our Solvers and would not agree to review proposed solutions. BP did eventually open up its own call for ideas and proposals. But their approach was far too broad, unfocused, and lacked sufficient transparency (particularly related to accurate technical data at the spill site) to elicit truly valuable submissions. Some argued they were simply responding to media pressure. Regardless, it was likely too little and too late to be make any real difference.

Notwithstanding BP’s lack of engagement, we at InnoCentive were so inspired by the early efforts that we promptly announced a commitment to provide our services pro bono in other qualifying crisis situations and we quickly launched the Emergency Response 2.0 Pavilion. We did this because as an organization we know it to be simply the right thing to do. Of course we’d need to understand when and how to action that commitment, particularly difficult given the inherent chaos and complexity that surrounds crisis situations by definition. (more…)

Clearly, we will be reviewing the chain of events, doing post mortems, and second guessing for a long time to come all the events before during, and after the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. There will be many points of view and they will differ greatly based upon your perspective. Corporations’ views will differ from environmentalists, lawyers’ will differ from engineers. And Gulf States inhabitants may have very different views than those from the Beltway in Washington D.C.

One area of focus will undoubtedly be whether we used all the tools at our disposal to respond to the crisis quickly and effectively. One might ask “Why wouldn’t we?” In reality, the discussion needs to be “What prevented us from doing so?”

More to come in later blog posts, but for now I thought it would be an opportune time to share some early reflections related to this oil crisis on this topic from my point of view. In particular, as we worked to energize problem solvers from all over the world to drive solutions for BP and the oil spill cleanup efforts, we and the world more broadly found it very difficult to pierce the corporate veil at BP to provide assistance. Even when BP provided vehicles for suggestions to be considered, it was clear that this was not a primary strategy. Most were not process, and frankly, the world was never given the transparency or tools by BP to fully participate in the process in the first place. Why was this so difficult and what can we learn? (more…)

The days and weeks pass, and, until last week, oil continued to blast upwards from the bottom of the Gulf. As time marches on, the pace of new solutions has slowed as well, yet we still continue to receive submissions from you about how to stop the gushing oil and protect the coastline.

With the end of the Gulf Oil Spill Challenge in sight, we wanted to showcase an innovative solution that was submitted by a student from an Advanced Placement (AP) Environmental Sciences class from high school in New Jersey.

What I love about this piece is that it came from the leaders of tomorrow (students), it’s simple, and it focuses on the future (the clean up) even while many people and politicians remain focused on the past (blame) or the present (capping the wellhead). Here is the submission:

“Recently in our AP Environmental class, my teacher came in and told us about the oil spill.

He then told us about your website and began having us work on the clean up crisis of the oil.

All of the students partnered up and started to try out their ideas, if they had any.

I then came up with the idea to use baking soda, which led to some good results, and which ultimately led to an expansion of the idea:

We discovered that baking soda would create tar balls for a long enough period of time that you could place something underneath them, collect them, and drag them out of the water in tact.

So then my friend and I tried placing nylon stocking on the oil to see if it would allow the oil to pass through, and it worked.

Nylon stockings allow the oil to seep through, but they block the clean water.

The result of our tests culminated in our final idea, which actually cleaned up the water to near perfect quality:

• Place the stocking on top of the oil (the oil passes through this porous barrier)
• Sprinkle baking soda on the stocking and the oil
• Wait up to one minute
• Pull the stockings out of the water, which collects the tar balls and leaves the water nearly completely clean

We tested this in class on a large scale and we were able to accomplish getting the water clean.

I hope this idea helps in the crisis and we wish you the best of luck!”

Greetings, InnoCentive Solvers—

Quick note to inform you that we’ve posted two new Emergency Response 2.0 Challenges around the Gulf Oil Spill disaster: Emergency Response 2.0: Oil Detection on Ocean Surfaces; and Emergency Response 2.0: Oil Collection in Gulf of Mexico.

Innovative solutions to these Challenges will help the organizers and crews clean the water and beaches in the short and medium terms.

For the Oil Detection on Ocean Surfaces Challenge we’re looking for new ways to improve the conventional imaging processes that are currently being deployed, i.e., satellite radar, visual, LIDAR, etc. We are also looking for ways to improve aerial tools aboard helicopters and aircrafts, and, to a lesser degree, surface spotting techniques.

For the Oil Collection in the Gulf of Mexico Challenge we’re looking for commercially available equipment, technology and ideas that would enable the rapid conversion of commercial vessels (e.g., fishing) into oil recovery units.

On the back-end, a board of advisers, currently being assembled, will review the submissions from both Challenges.

That said we also want to take advantage of the perspectives, skills, and talents in the InnoCentive network. In order to accomplish that, we have activated the discussion board within the project rooms.

Please take a look as soon as you can.

Best,

JD