Perspectives on Innovation

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…)

Adam Rivers, a Nature-referred Solver, won the Heat Stable Prevention of Flavan3-ols – Iron (II) Interactions Challenge.

I recently solved a Challenge about milkshakes that seemingly had nothing to do with my day job working as a postdoc in marine science at the University of Georgia. I’m a biological oceanographer by training, but the Challenge I solved was about iron and beverage discoloration. During my PhD at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/MIT, I studied how marine microbes interact with natural iron binding chemicals called siderophores. When I read the detailed description of the problem, I realized that it was essentially another case of an iron complexation reaction that occurs naturally in the ocean. Almost immediately, I had a few ideas. I ran through some of the kinetic equations and did a bit of kitchen chemistry, and after a long weekend, I had come up with a solution to the problem.

I read about InnoCentive on Nature.com a few years back and signed up to receive emails about Challenges. All of the problems don’t catch my eye, but occasionally, there will be a problem that I quickly have an idea about. I’m always dreaming up new products or ways to improve things. If you have that kind of personality, ideas (some good, some bad) come all the time, but of course you can’t pursue most of them. It can take years to pursue an idea academically or start a company based on an idea. InnoCentive is great because it allows anyone to invest a little bit of time writing up the sort of ideas that come to them all the time.

I have a long-term goal to build simple devices that can describe microbial communities remotely and send that ecological information to a web browser anywhere. As a spinout of that work, I’ve built a user-friendly lab freezer monitor that I’m trying to commercialize. Developing a product is a very different process; the biggest challenge is not solving a problem but making sure you are solving the right problem. With InnoCentive Challenges, the problem has already been found, I just focus on finding an answer. It’s fun to have an outlet to apply my knowledge in unexpected ways. My training in one field brought a fresh perspective to a problem in another field; the ability of open innovation to borrow ideas from other fields was certainly an advantage in solving this Challenge.

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…)

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