Perspectives on Innovation

I recently spoke to a group of small business owners at a Chamber of Commerce in Belgium. As we began our discussion, it became clear that many were intrigued by the idea of engaging the crowd to solve problems, but were also concerned that tapping into the crowd was the purview of the big enterprise – a valuable, exciting trend that was beyond the budget of a small company.

It’s not the first time we’ve been asked: “can small businesses afford to run Challenges?” But as I’ll discuss below, the question should really be: “can they afford not to?” There are at least three reasons why small businesses should harness the crowd:

1. Data-driven decisions – As they expand and grow, small businesses make selective decisions on which services and tools to invest in. This means that dollars or pounds are often spent where the opportunity for returns is highest. Our pricing models, combined with data derived from running more than 1,600 public Challenges, enables CEOs to make cost calculations up front as well as understand what outcomes they can reasonably expect.
2. Diverse & expansive reach – Not only can Challenges enable you to benefit from the expertise and creativity of InnoCentive’s crowd of nearly 300,000 problem Solvers, you can also view it as a marketing exercise. How long would it take, and how much would it cost, for a small business to engage thousands of people spread across every continent on its own? An exciting Challenge concept can elevate the profile of a small company and attract significant consumer and press attention.
3. Stay lean (Talent On-Demand) – Crowdsourcing enables you to tap into the crowd when you need them – like the cloud computing of people, you don’t pay for the crowd when you’re not using it, but they are there when you need help. Small businesses have particularly tended to come our way when faced with problems outside of their core competencies.

One of my favourite examples of how to do this well concerns a start-up that was looking to develop a marketing strategy for a niche product that hasn’t yet hit the market. The CEO had a marketing executive to roll out the campaign, but wanted to be confident of the strategy before going forward – a lacklustre launch campaign could have had a devastating impact. He could have left it to the marketing executive to develop the strategy alone – this would have been cheaper in the short term, but would have cost the company dearly if the strategy failed to resonate. Alternatively, he could have hired a marketing agency to produce a strategy – for an experienced agency, this has a considerable price tag, and he would have received the best ideas from a group of only 3-4 people. An added risk was that the strategy they put forward would be one that the marketing executive couldn’t implement alone. (more…)

The 2013 Front End of Innovation (FEI) conference was held in Boston this week. Transcending the typical conference model, the gathering challenged innovation thought leaders, experts, and practitioners to pursue bold new practices and more meaningful collaboration. The buzz included thought leaders presenting new theories, vendors demonstrating inspired collaboration platforms, and practitioners sharing learnings. The highlight of the conference, titled “Connect Meaningfully Through a Challenge,” brought all aspects together as teams of cross-industry attendees joined forces over the three day session to accelerate the innovation process and create real deliverables.

The engaging exercise, sponsored by Seek Company, InnoCentive, and digital agency R/GA, tasked supercharged teams of diverse thinkers and innovation leaders with generating big innovation process ideas that holistically address typical organizational barriers including culture, design, systems, and time. InnoCentive, who has spent over a decade perfecting the Challenge Driven Innovation methodology, coupled well with Seek, whose insight-driven approach begins with human behavioral understanding and empathetic engagement.

The result was a fresh, unique methodology that allowed participants to rapidly collaborate while maximizing the benefits of their varying backgrounds and experience. The process was brought to life in four sessions:

During the networking reception, InnoCentive sponsored a drink aptly named "Crowdsauce"

Step 1: Defining the challenge – Identifying key barriers to each innovation conundrum (culture, system, design, and time)

Step  2: Generating unique ideas – Ideating against each of the identified barriers

Step 3: Integrating solutions – Constructing total solutions that address all four barriers

Step 4: Evaluation – Submitting and presenting the solutions to a judging panel

Once the sessions were completed, an expert panel began evaluations focused on four criteria – winning solutions needed to be integrated, applicable, inspiring, and novel. Again the InnoCentive methodology, which defines specific success criteria up front, helped ensure that proposed solutions were relevant and actionable. The winning team presented a solution called “See It! Say It!,” a visionary mobile phone app that allows anyone in the organization to capture and share new innovation opportunities in real-time, including visuals such as pictures and video.

Straddling the line between power networking and collaborative workshop, this exercise was just the buzz that FEI 2013 needed. As has been the case for a decade, InnoCentive was thrilled to co-sponsor the event and share best practices. The benefit of unique collaboration was not exclusive to workshop participants, either. Coming out of the conference Seek, InnoCentive, and R/GA all learned from each other’s unique approaches, which will translate into producing even more meaningful results for their respective clients in 2013 and beyond.

Authored by Eric Seibold, Director of Innovation Expansion, InnoCentive

In collaboration with NASA, we launched the NASA Innovation Pavilion in late 2009. Seven Challenges were launched over the course of several months, in total attracting nearly 3,000 Solvers, 360 solution submissions, and all of the Challenges were awarded either fully or partially. Since this time, NASA has been and continues to leverage our InnoCentive@Work platform for promoting collaboration and problem solving internally within the agency. Today, we’re very pleased to announce that NASA’s Pavilion is once again back in action with two new Challenges for our Solvers to tackle. We recently spoke with Jenn Gustetic, Prizes and Challenges Program Executive for NASA, about the re-invigoration of the Pavilion and the new Challenges now posted online.

Hello Ms. Gustetic – thanks for joining us today. We’re thrilled that the Pavilion is back online with two (and we hope many, many more) Challenges now posted. What were your primary motivations for jumping “back in the saddle?”

Thanks for having me! We’re also thrilled that the Pavilion currently has two active Challenges on it, and we’re excited to see the innovative ideas that the public will provide.

I’m proud to say that NASA has been a leader in the Federal government’s use of prize competitions for quite some time. We’re an agency founded on solving tough problems and we believe in the power of open innovation to help address those problems in partnership with innovators from around the country and the world. The White House recently recognized this leadership in their 2012 Report to Congress on prize competitions: “From the Centennial Challenges Program, to the NASA Open Innovation Pavilion, to the NASA Tournament Lab, NASA leads the public sector in the breadth and depth of experience and experimentation with prizes and challenges.” So continuing our use of the Pavilion is consistent both with our problem solving philosophy and our leadership role in government.

NASA is on the cutting edge of adopting new processes, methods, and technologies to drive innovation. How does the use of open innovation Challenges to generate new ideas and solve important problems fit within the broader context of NASA’s overall innovation agenda?

At NASA, prizes complement our other traditional problem solving approaches to create a robust toolset of innovation and engagement approaches for use by a variety of programs. Open innovation, specifically through incentive prizes, offers many unique benefits that enhance our problem solving toolkit. Prize competitions allow NASA and other agencies to:

• Establish an ambitious goal without having to predict which team or approach is most likely to succeed
• Benefit from novel approaches without bearing high levels of risk
• Reach beyond the “usual suspects” to increase the number of minds tackling a problem
• Bring out-of-discipline perspectives to bear
• Increase cost-effectiveness to maximize the return on taxpayer dollars
• Enable us to pay only for success

The first new Challenge, Strain Measurement of Vectran and Kevlar Webbing, has been online for a few weeks now and closes on January 2, 2013. More than 300 Solvers have already signed up to participate. What are some of the key attributes you’d like to see in a winning solution? (more…)

We recently announced the successful outcome of the Popular Science-InnoCentive Education Challenge. The Challenge, which attracted more than 1,200 Solvers from around the world, asked for lesson plans that could be used at the middle-school level in each of five areas of science that will be vital in the future. Materials couldn’t cost more than $50, and the lesson needed to fit into no more than three, 50-minute classes. We asked Jacob Ward, editor-in-chief of Popular Science, to chat with us about the Challenge and results.

Hello Mr. Ward – thanks for joining us today. Could you tell us about the genesis of this Challenge and what you hoped to accomplish?

For our annual education special — the September issue of Popular Science — we look for ways to inspire a wide range of readers. Our audience runs the age range from 10-year-olds all the way up to retired grandparents. So Popular Science, in collaboration with InnoCentive, wanted to run a Challenge that could conceivably affect all of these people.

The Challenge asked Solvers to submit lessons plan in five distinct areas – Bomimetics, fuel cells, polymers, climate change, and “big data.” What led you to choose these specific areas?

In the end, we wanted to come up with lesson plans for the future of science, out beyond what people are teaching today. We consulted with educators, futurists, and other experts to settle on five areas of growing interest, and that we knew had the potential to really revolutionize their respective fields. Biologically-inspired (biomimetic) design is a growing trend at the moment, fuel cells could truly overturn the power mechanisms we rely on today, and everyone’s talking about “big data” — we figured that if we could engage kids today in these areas, we’d be helping to pave the way to some truly revolutionary work when those kids enter the workforce in a couple of decades.

You posted the winning solutions (i.e., lesson plans) on PopSci.com, along with details about the second and third place entrants. What drove you to open the solutions to the public and what’s the response been like?

With a Challenge like this, it was incredibly difficult to choose a winning entry for each category, because we received so many inspiring and revolutionary ideas. So we figured that even though not everyone could win, we wanted as many lesson plans as possible to get public visibility. There were so many useful lesson plans submitted, and teachers need new lesson plans so badly, why not put them all out there?

Of the dozens of InnoCentive Challenges that have been posted to the PopSci Innovation Pavilion, we’ve seen PopSci provide significant lift – both in terms of number of Solvers and their submissions. To what do you attribute your readers embracing open innovation Challenges and becoming successful Solvers? (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…)