Perspectives on Innovation

Our client Vestergaard Frandsen recently launched a $20,000 Challenge seeking designs or materials for a storage bag, container, or vessel that protects seeds and grains against rodent infestations. Vestergaard Frandsen makes life-saving products available to individuals around the world who are the most vulnerable to communicable diseases. We recently spoke with Navneet Garg, Chief Development Officer at Vestergaard Frandsen, about the Challenge.

Hello Mr. Garg – thank you for joining us today. Vestergaard Frandsen has a unique “humanitarian entrepreneurship” business model. Could you tell us more about it, and some of your accomplishments over the years?

We are a small but impactful global company headquartered in Switzerland. Our scientists, public health professionals, and regional staff on five continents are dedicated to developing and implementing tools to keep people healthy in the developing world. Innovation is at the core of all of our work because the stakes are so high. Breakthrough new ideas fostered by Vestergaard Frandsen will save the lives of the most underserved people on the planet.

We manufacture the best-selling and longest-lasting insecticidal bed net called PermaNet®. These bed nets have protected half a billion people – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and under age five – from malaria, one of the leading killers of people living there. Our LifeStraw® water purification technology has been deployed for virtually every major international emergency since 2005. We were also the first company to leverage carbon offsets to fund the world’s largest privately financed water project. It is currently providing sustainable access to safe water for 4.5 million people, most of whom have never had access to safe water in their homes.

What are your objectives for this Challenge and what motivated you to crowdsource it through InnoCentive?

Our guiding star for innovation has been the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG), and our major focus is providing access to safe water and preventing disease such as HIV and malaria. But we also recognize the need to tackle the vital problem of hunger and malnutrition (also an MDG). We can do this by contributing to food security, and in this regard, we are taking one of our core areas of expertise – vector control for public health – and using it to spur breakthrough ideas to prevent rodents from gnawing into food storage bags.

The amount of food that is lost or goes to waste between the time it is harvested and consumed is staggering. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates the waste at 1.3 billion metric tons per year. Processing and packaging is identified as a key problem contributing to wasted food.

Food security is important everywhere, and the more brilliant minds we have to work on solving this problem, the sooner we can help farmers decrease waste and loss and reduce hunger. InnoCentive was the natural place to find and attract bright new ideas in a short time frame.

What are some of the limitations that you’ve identified in solutions currently being used? (more…)

We are collaborating with AARP Foundation, AARP’s charitable affiliate, to help advance the Foundation’s cause of improving the lives of millions of older Americans who struggle to meet their basic needs for nutritious food, safe and affordable housing, adequate income, and personal connections. As part of our work together, InnoCentive and AARP Foundation have launched the AARP Foundation-InnoCentive Challenge Series, which is comprised of a dedicated Pavilion along with two new Challenges focused on food insecurity. We asked Jo Ann Jenkins, president of AARP Foundation, to chat with us about the Foundation, the collaboration and its goals, and the two new Challenges now open to Solvers on InnoCentive.com. [Ed note: A press release of the partnership and Challenge announcement can be found here.]

Hello Ms. Jenkins – we appreciate you taking the time to join us. First of all, can you tell us more about the AARP Foundation?  
I’m delighted to. America has always been known as the land of opportunity. But for an alarming number of Americans age 50 and above, any opportunity feels distant right now, if not totally unobtainable. Uncertainty is the new normal – one in four workers has burned through their savings and many are living from paycheck to paycheck. They have worked hard, paid their taxes, and served their communities and country, but now they’re on the road to economic disaster. AARP Foundation helps struggling people 50+ to win back opportunity and move from vulnerability to stability.

According to the Foundation’s research, nearly 9 million American adults age 50 and older are at risk of hunger. How is the Foundation addressing this critical issue?
Working with AARP, we began Drive to End Hunger in 2011, a comprehensive, long-term national initiative with the goal of solving one of the most urgent and challenging issues of our time – hunger among older people. This initiative includes several key programs:

(1) Our cause-marketing work with NASCAR four-time Sprint Cup series winner Jeff Gordon and team owner Rick Hendrick of Hendrick Motorsports to raise awareness of hunger and raise funds to fight it. NASCAR fans are one of the most charitable and community-oriented group of sports fans in the U.S.

2) Educating and enrolling people age 60+ in SNAP (formerly known as food stamps). SNAP is the cornerstone of the federal nutrition programs. While overall program participation has increased with the economic downturn, senior participation in SNAP has remained chronically low with only 1 out of every 3 adults 60+ who are eligible for benefits actually receiving them.

SNAP is not simply a nutrition assistance program that allows recipients to purchase food for good health; it is also an economic support program. The average monthly benefit amount for seniors receiving SNAP is $119, or $1,400 a year. This benefit boosts the budgets of low-income seniors so they don’t have to make impossible choices between feeding themselves or getting their prescriptions filled. On average, SNAP benefits last far longer than an emergency food box (2.5 to 3 weeks vs. 2 days), and empower seniors to choose foods that meet their dietary requirements and cultural needs. (more…)

We recently completed an Ideation Challenge for the Sandler-Kenner Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer which looked for new tools and approaches for earlier diagnosis of this deadly disease. We spoke with Dr. Gregory Echt, Chairman of the Foundation, about his experience with the Challenge process and the results. 

Hello Dr. Echt. As we understand it, this was your first experience with Challenge Driven Innovation. How did it go?

We felt the InnoCentive Challenge went very smoothly. We appreciated the help and support of your staff in guiding us through the process, as well as helping us to understand how to most effectively formulate our Challenge and to review submissions. 

Was there anything that particularly surprised you during the Challenge?

We were pleased with the number of replies and equally impressed with the overall quality of the responses. They were thoughtful and demonstrated novel and critical thinking skills, often utilizing research approaches from other areas of science. The reach of the Challenge was astounding — we had interest from over 500 Solvers in 57 countries. Over 60 submissions came from 17 countries, which confirmed to us that early detection of pancreatic cancer is a pressing worldwide problem. 

You ended up making four awards totaling $12,500.  Tell us about some of the solutions you received and their possible impact.

I want to reiterate that I was very pleased with the quality of all of the submissions. In general, we found the winning solutions remained focused on our goal, which is to develop highly sensitive detection tools that can be easily implemented by medical professionals and eventually cost effective enough to become part of a routine medical practice. The winning team from New Delhi applied their expertise and knowledge gained through studies on the development of a non-invasive early diagnostic method for tuberculosis. The three recognition awards had varied backgrounds. One is a senior lecturer in molecular microbiology, and another has an M.D.-Ph.D. in biophysics with an interest in the nano-technological side of bioresearch.  The third recognition awardee proposed the use of a 3D non-invasive high resolution ultrasound. Interestingly enough, this awardee was motivated by a family member who had recently been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

I believe that you have been in touch with the winning Solvers. Can you tell us more about those conversations and your plans for the winning solutions?

We have been in touch with all of the Solvers. They have all expressed their appreciation for the recognition of their work. One of the awardees indicated that his research team would use this award to fund a pilot study. We have also put the winning Solvers in touch with each other, encouraging them to learn from each other and to continue the discussion on early detection. We plan to follow these researchers in order to encourage the development of their ideas.

Our Solvers always welcome feedback.  Is there any advice you would offer after reviewing so many submissions? (more…)

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 »

Hello Solvers,

We are currently doing a study with researchers at Erasmus University (Rotterdam, Netherlands) concerning open innovation and prize-based crowdsourcing. They have already conducted personal interviews with several Solvers and as a follow-up will be sending out a survey this week to a few thousand active Solvers. In the researcher’s words:

“We aim to understand your motivations, perceptions, thoughts, and how you solve Challenges.”

I just wanted to give you a heads-up that you might receive this survey in the coming days and mention a few things:

1. The survey is anonymous. It will mention a specific Challenge to which you submitted a solution, but the researchers will not know who you are or see your actual submission – they will just know that you submitted to that particular Challenge. Again, your responses will be treated anonymously and only be used for academic purposes and improving our services.
2. Any Solver who opted out of receiving emails from InnoCentive will not receive the Survey.
3. The survey is targeting “active” Solvers, that is, those that have submitted to several Challenges in recent history. Some will be award winners and some will not.
4. The survey should only take about 15 minutes of your time.

Not everyone will receive a survey, but please check your email (and spam-box) for the survey next week. We ask that you answer all questions as accurately and honestly as possible so that we can build your feedback and insights into our future Challenges and serve you better.

Thank you in advance!

Michael Albarelli
InnoCentive-Erasmus University Research Team