Perspectives on Innovation

Thomson Reuters recently completed the “Ideation” phase of a two-part Challenge series. In January 2013, Thomson Reuters launched Seeking Creative Use Cases for Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge which engaged over 830 Solvers from around the world and solicited over 177 solution submissions. This Challenge sought creative use cases for Web of Knowledge content, tools, and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that would enable users to engage in creative new behaviors, beyond what is currently possible with online research portals. Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge is an online research platform that provides a single point of access to premier multidisciplinary content alongside emerging trends, subject specific content, and research data to provide a multifaceted view of scholarly outputs. In this Seeker Spotlight, we again speak with Ellen Rotenberg (click here to view her first post), senior manager of product innovation at Thomson Reuters, about the results of the first Challenge as well as insights into the second Challenge, Expose Data Relationships Through Visualization of Thomson Reuters Web of Science Content, which launched today. [Ed note: View Thomson Reuters’ dedicated landing page which provides additional information about both phases of the Challenge series].

Hello Ms. Rotenberg – great to have you back on the program, and congratulations on the successful “Ideation” phase of your two-part Challenge series. Were there any common threads or themes which connected the solution submissions, and what differentiated the winning solutions from the rest?

Thank you! Within the 177 solutions we received, there were a number of themes that emerged including: improved access to content through mobile and next-generation web-based UIs; data visualization and analysis; and, improved search relevancy and results presentation. The three winning solutions rose above the rest due to the level of details included, as well as how well they met our published success criteria.

If you’d like to learn more about the winning solutions, please view the interviews that Thomson Reuters conducted with the Solvers.

An important component of your first Challenge was to engage Thomson Reuters’ users – researchers, scientists, students, scholars, information professionals, etc. – in new and meaningful ways. What’s their reaction been?

As noted in my last Seeker Spotlight post, our primary focus is delivering tools and services that will delight our customers, as well as deliver them the content, metrics, and analysis required to make informed decisions. We received a high level of engagement for this Challenge, illustrating the fact that Web of Knowledge has a passionate customer base, with a creative vision of where the discovery experience for scholarly content should be heading over the next five years.

As a first time practitioner of InnoCentive Challenges, how would you describe your overall experience throughout the course of the first Challenge?

Participation in the first Challenge was a rewarding experience. We’re very happy with the level of interest the Ideation Challenge received. The Challenge Evaluation Team, representing a diverse group of Thomson Reuters colleagues across geographic locations, selected the winning solutions based on published selection criteria, including technical feasibility and global reach. We were all impressed with the breath and depth of the submissions and are evaluating how to incorporate some of these into our development roadmaps and plans.

As you look to the “Build” phase of your Challenge series with Expose Data Relationships Through Visualization of Thomson Reuters Web of Science Content, what are some of the key attributes you’d like to see (or not see) in a winning solution? (more…)

The nonprofit Alliance for Contraception in Cats & Dogs (ACC&D) recently completed its inaugural Challenge, Marking Methods to Identify Contracepted/Sterilized Cats and Dogs. Through the Challenge, ACC&D generated novel ideals for identifying effective, non-surgical, and humane methods of marking individual animals that will identify them as “contracepted” on a permanent or long term basis. We recently spoke with Joyce Briggs, President of ACC&D, about her organization and the results of the Challenge.

Hello Ms. Briggs – thank you for joining us today. Could you start by telling us a bit about the history, mission, and goals of ACC&D?

ACC&D’s mission is to expedite the successful introduction of methods to non-surgically sterilize dogs and cats, and to support the distribution and promotion of these products to humanely control cat and dog populations.

Sterilization has long been recognized as the most humane and effective way of managing reproduction in cats and dogs. We absolutely support traditional surgical sterilization, but we want to expand the “toolbox.” Relying only on surgery, we continue to have millions of homeless animals, overcrowded shelters, and avoidable suffering. Non-surgical sterilization and contraception options omit the need for skilled veterinary surgeons, a sterile surgical environment, recovery space, anesthesia, and incision monitoring. As a result, we expand options for lower-income communities, animal shelters, and free-roaming cat and dog populations. This has tremendous benefits for animal welfare, shelter resources, and even public health.

ACC&D was founded in 2000 as a program of Auburn University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. In 2006, we became an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit. We now have a small staff and a very engaged Board of Directors and Scientific Advisory Board. Board members and Scientific Advisors hail from leading animal welfare organizations, veterinary schools, and research institutions; they are a vital asset.

In 2008, ACC&D’s work was advanced when Found Animals Foundation launched the Michelson Prize & Grants in Reproductive Biology. This committed up to $75 million in research support and award money to develop a non-surgical sterilant that is safe, effective, and practical for use in male and female cats and dogs. Add to that the first FDA-approved non-surgical sterilant for male dogs (Zeuterin™), which is expected to be available commercially in the U.S. in mid-2013, and ACC&D’s mission and objectives have received a lot of attention in recent years! We’ll host our 5^th International Symposium June 20-22 in Portland, Oregon. We also just released a free e-book on fertility control in dogs and cats—the definitive reference guide to this growing field.

Can you help us understand more about the importance of humane cat and dog population control and how the issue has evolved over the past decade?

Geographic scope matters when answering this question. In the U.S. alone, an estimated 3-4 million animals are euthanized each year. Any unsterilized dog or cat is at risk of contributing to these numbers. Low-cost, high-quality, high-volume spay/neuter resources have expanded in the past decade, which has helped make surgical sterilization more affordable. Even so, this has not been able to keep millions of animals from ending up euthanized—an animal welfare issue to be sure, but also a social and economic burden for communities. Adding non-surgical options to the “toolbox” is vital to reducing numbers of homeless animals.

The situation in many other parts of the world is much more desperate. In dozens of nations, poverty is endemic. Limited veterinary and financial resources simply cannot support large-scale surgical sterilization for canine and feline population control. Municipal animal care and control systems are primitive or non-existent, and surplus animals are often killed by archaic methods such as drowning, electrocution, and poisoning.

Public health and rabies are also a consideration. In many countries free-roaming dogs are common. The World Health Organization estimates that over 55,000 people die of rabies annually, mostly in Asia and Africa; dogs are the source of the majority of human rabies deaths.

In recent decades, it has become widely accepted that “culling” does not permanently reduce canine populations or prevent rabies. Canine contraception and rabies vaccination are essential. In communities with limited resources, non-surgical options, particularly injectible ones, have the potential to vastly increase the numbers of dogs both sterilized and vaccinated against rabies. The result is improved animal and human health and welfare.

What prompted you to partner with InnoCentive and use crowdsourcing as part of your strategy rather than rely on traditional avenues of research such as grants? (more…)

Lumina Foundation recently announced a series of Challenges and a dedicated Pavilion on InnoCentive.com to spur innovation in areas that would transform higher education in America. The Foundation’s first Challenge, Design of Student-centric Websites for Open-Enrollment Colleges and Institutions, is underway and will close on April 30. Two additional Challenges were recently launched and are currently available on Lumina Foundation’s Open Innovation Pavilion. We recently spoke with Juan (Kiko) Suarez, Vice President of Communications and Innovation at the Foundation, about this exciting initiative.

Hello Mr. Suarez – thanks very much for speaking with us. For those not familiar with Lumina Foundation, can you tell us a bit about your work?

Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates, and other credentials to 60% by 2025 (we call this Goal2025). Lumina’s outcomes-based approach focuses on helping to design and build an accessible, responsive, and accountable higher education system while fostering a national sense of urgency for action to achieve Goal2025.

The Challenges you are launching support the Foundation’s new Strategic Plan, which includes some big goals for higher education in this country. Can you tell us more about the problems you’re addressing and the goals you’ve set?

We are solely focused on helping the country reach Goal2025. This strategic plan covers the time frame between 2013 and 2016. Over the years, we found that Lumina must play four roles in this journey to the goal: goal setter, framework developer, thought leader, and honest broker. We have published a plan with eight strategies organized under two imperatives: mobilization and design. Mobilization is aimed at getting different actors in post-secondary education (e.g., policy makers, education institutions, non-profits, and employers) to commit to serious increases in attainment of students that are considered “non-traditional” but represent a new majority in the 21st century: students of color, low income, first generation, and adults with some college credit but not a degree.

The second imperative, design and build, is aimed at redesigning key components of the current postsecondary system that we believe will unlock more capacity and better quality to serve those students. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the issue: America currently has only 40% of its working age adults between 18-64 with some sort of recognized credential or degree beyond high school. Our goal is to increase attainment to 60%, without losing quality (or even doing a better job with quality of learning). This means getting 23 million more people in the U.S. studying and receiving a meaningful credential, certificate, or degree post high school. We believe that credentialed learning is currency for individuals and the country. We can attract more jobs of the future, and grow our economy by $500 billion if we can have that done by 2025.

Many foundations would traditionally issue an RFP and/or award grants to address their needs. What prompted you to partner with InnoCentive and use crowdsourcing as part of your strategy?

We will continue to issue targeted RFPs and grants as our main vehicles to fund relevant work, but open innovation adds to our capacity to bring solutions from talented Solvers all over the world that otherwise we would never reach. Our agreement with InnoCentive is perfect for that, since they have the community, processes, and tools to make that happen in a very well organized and transparent way.

The Foundation’s focus is on higher education in America, yet many of our Solvers are from other countries. How do you believe our non-U.S. Solvers can contribute and provide value?
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The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its partner Humanity United recently announced the first-round winners of the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention – a technology competition enlisting Solvers from around the world in support of the White House’s effort to design new tools to help prevent and respond to mass atrocities. Seven innovations won first, second, and third place prizes ranging from $1,000 to $5,000; information about the winners and their solutions can be found here. USAID and Humanity United have just launched three new Challenges, one of which is being run on the InnoCentive platform and is offering a $20,000 prize purse for a Mechanism for Secure 2-way Communications During a Crisis. We recently spoke with Mark Goldenbaum, a Democracy Specialist at USAID, about the Tech Challenge series, the successful completion of the first two Challenges, and the newly launched Secure Communications Challenge.

Hello Mr. Goldenbaum – thanks for joining us today. Could you take us back a bit in time and help us to understand the genesis of the Tech Challenge series and your primary objectives for the program?

In April 2012, President Obama unveiled his comprehensive strategy to prevent and respond to atrocities at a moving speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum. I was lucky enough to be sitting in the crowd that day for the President’s speech, and it was an unforgettable thrill when he mentioned that USAID would seek new applications of technology to help with this issue. Of course, we had been working for several weeks behind the scenes to design an approach for doing just that. And whether I knew it at the time or not, the best thing that happened to USAID in that process was linking up with Humanity United (HU), a private foundation dedicated to this issue, bringing creative thinking and energy as well as contacts and deep knowledge of this field. Together, we committed to a “Challenge” approach that would help us identify innovative applications of new and existing technologies to the issue of atrocity prevention. As for the five problem areas that we chose to focus on, these were initially identified by USAID and HU after a series of internal consultations, but then greatly strengthened and refined by reaching out to broad range of groups and experts working on these issues to make sure these reflected real world needs and opportunities.

What was your primary motivation for crowdsourcing your Challenges (as opposed to using more “traditional” means such as academic research or grants to solicit ideas and solutions)?

Broadly speaking, both USAID and HU are interested in “open source development” processes such as these to engage a broader and more diverse community than we might otherwise reach. While the professional development community and human rights groups are doing inspiring work in their own right, the idea that other fields of research or industry might have technologies, approaches, or tools that could be easily adapted to advance development or achieve conflict prevention goals is incredibly exciting. Engaging universities, students, non-profits focused on other fields, the private sector, engineers, developers, and others has been a long-standing goal, and the emergence of platforms such as InnoCentive now give us the tools to more easily do that.

What’s your sense of the role that the NASA Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) is playing in helping to guide other federal agencies in their use of open Challenges and prizes?

Clearly, there is a lot happening inside and outside of government related to the use of prizes and Challenges. Too often, we find ourselves having to recreate the wheel or repeat others’ mistakes that could have been avoided. As both a taxpayer and a federal employee, I was thrilled to find out that there was a dedicated resource created with the intention of helping other federal agencies and departments tap into a source of best practices and collective learning, and help them to better understand the state of the art. My grandfather was actually a Mission Control engineer with NASA, so I was predisposed to liking CoECI. But they have certainly surpassed my highest expectations, helping neophytes like myself better understand the industry, find the right partners, ask the right questions, and design our Challenges in a way that puts us in a position to find the best solutions. CoECI has been a great partner, and any success that we have is certainly in large part due to their assistance.

For your first two Challenges, you recognized seven innovations and awarded first, second, and third place prizes ranging from $1,000 to $5,000. What stood out among the seven innovations and differentiated them from the other solution submissions? (more…)

The Neurofibromatosis Therapeutic Accelerations Program (NTAP) at Johns Hopkins launched a Challenge in mid-January which seeks creative ways to identify which plexiform neurofibroma tumors will undergo significant growth in individuals who have neurofibromatosis type 1 (a syndrome with a well-defined genetic cause but complex biology at the tissue level). We recently spoke with Dr. Jaishri Blakeley, Assistant Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Director of the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Neurofibromatosis Center, about this important Challenge which is scheduled to run through February 13, 2013.

Hello Dr. Blakeley – thanks for joining us today. Could you help us understand more about neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) and its symptoms, causes, and current treatments?

NF1 is a common (prevalence 1:2700) autosomal dominant neurogenetic disorder caused by a mutation on chromosome 17q that results in reduced levels of neurofibromin. One well described role of neurofibromin is the regulation of the Ras pathway. It is thought that chronic activation of the Ras pathway in the absence of normal neurofibromin causes the symptoms of NF1. Clinically, NF1 presents with diverse clinical features ranging from mild skin markings to learning difficulties, brain tumors, peripheral tumors, bone abnormalities, and various forms of cancer. 

The hallmark tumor of NF1 is the neurofibroma. These are tumors composed of nerve elements such as Schwann cells and neural tissue but also fibroblasts, mast cells, and pericytes. The most common form of neurofibroma is the cutaneous (skin) form that can number into the thousands in a given patient and can be disfiguring due to their appearance on the skin, but are not otherwise medically dangerous. Far more medically concerning are plexiform neurofibromas that occur along peripheral nerves throughout the body and can take over an entire body region. These tumors may compress vital structures such as the spinal cord or major vessels, cause neurologic dysfunction or pain, or lead to extensive regional disfigurement. Up to 50% of patients with NF1 have at least one plexiform neurofibroma. Plexiform neurofibromas also have a risk of transforming into malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors, which are very aggressive sarcomas. The only established treatment for neurofibromas is surgery. Unfortunately, given that these tumors grow within the normal nerve structure, complete resection can result in major nerve damage, and with incomplete resection, the tumors simply continue to grow. Hence, we are in desperate need of additional treatments for plexiform neurofibromas. The trick is that in NF1, a patient may have four plexiform neurofibromas and three of them will never cause a problem, but that fourth one may cause terrible problems. We need a way to predict which tumor is going to be the “bad egg” before it starts. 

Since January 2012, when NTAP was created to fast-track the development of therapies to treat tumors associated with NF1, what are some of the key accomplishments that can you point to?

NTAP was founded to focus research efforts entirely on creating and supporting opportunities that encourage the most thoughtful and efficient development of therapies for plexiform neurofibromas. The first step in this process was to perform an analysis of where the field was in order to allow identification of areas that needed the greatest attention and resources. We identified several key areas of need including cell culture models, a need to predict tumor behavior in order to allow prevention, clinical trial outcome measures, and natural history data pools. NTAP is supporting all of these initiatives in order to “fertilize the field” so that research across the board is developed to help patients with NF1 as quickly as possible. Thus far, we have fast tracked a cellular culture model initiative, partnered with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance a natural history initiative, and are actively building collaborations to bridge the excellent scientists within the field of NF and those new to the syndrome. Our mission is to move good ideas into thoughtful research questions as quickly as possible so that the things with the best chance of helping patients get developed as rapidly as science will allow. This takes a broad outreach, a lot of partnership, high energy, and a willingness to take some risks with “out of the box” ideas.

As an Ideation Challenge with a guaranteed award for at least one submitted solution, what are some of the key attributes you’d like to see in a winning solution? (more…)