Perspectives on Innovation

Sitali Mushemi-Blake and her team at Cardiac Health Across Zambia (CHAZ) won two prizes, Best Idea and Collegiality, in the Lion’s Den Challenge. InnoCentive delivered the Lion’s Den Programme in cooperation with King’s College London.

I am the founder of a social enterprise called Cardiac Health Across Zambia (CHAZ) and a post-doctorate cardiac research physiologist based at King’s College London.

I first heard of the Lion’s Den Challenge through a close friend, Dr. Jason Mellad, who won the competition in 2010. I since wanted to enter the competition but remained focused and dedicated to completing my degree. Besides, I had too much on my plate at the time juggling studies, work, and life balances as a mother. When I finished defending my PhD thesis in Cardiovascular Medicine in the Fall of 2012, I received a circulating email informing prospect applicants that the Challenge was running for 2012-13. My focus changed as I realised that the window of opportunity was narrow.

My experience with the InnoCentive team has been a very positive one from the time I first walked through the door. Despite my lack of business experience, I quickly felt at home. I was keen to win the prize, and therefore attended the associated seminars and contributed to group discussions. The seminars proved to be a great source of information regarding business awareness, the different stages involved in the competition, and identifying strong team players. I made use of the networking sessions by speaking to attending mentors, guest speakers, and previous winners. The team at InnoCentive followed up on my email enquiries regarding able mentors.

It was after attending team building seminars that I trusted my ‘gut instincts’ in finding prospective passionate team members to help develop my idea. Our highly specialised multi-disciplinary and culturally diverse team from Kings College London consisted of myself (an imaging specialist), Dr. Sitara Khan (a cardiac registrar), and Dr. Yiwen Liu (a cardiac scientist) – a team with skill sets that if partnered with the Zambian government would make an impact on people’s lives. We worked incredibly well together and were able to effectively focus on different areas of the business.

Our hard work was guided and supported by two great mentors, Mr. Zulfiqar Deo and Mr. Gerry Creedon, who were able to develop my initial idea. What started out as a vague idea for a clinic in Zambia grew to a plan for a social enterprise providing training for Zambians and students for the UK.

As a team, we worked hard alongside our mentors to draw up a business plan and submit our proposal, which to our delight made it to the semifinals. We had to work even harder to consolidate our idea into a six-minute pitch to present in front of the judging panel and the Lion’s Den team. Our hard work paid off and our team was awarded not one, but two prizes: Best Business Idea and Collegiality.

Winning the Lion’s Den Challenge has helped our enterprise secure seed funds to register our company and cover some of the legal costs. My experience with InnoCentive has no doubt enhanced my career path and confidence.

To all future entrants of the Lion’s Den Challenge or any competitions organised through InnoCentive, my advice would be: As Sir James Black said to me in 2008, “pick up those pebbles on the beach because if you don’t, someone else will.”

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.

Bogdan and Stephanie Yamkovenko won The Economist-Nielsen Data Visualization Challenge, which asked the World to review Nielsen consumer data, generate insightful conclusions with broad implications, and present a compelling visual presentation of the most interesting ideas from the data. Over 4,000 Solvers from 101 countries signed up to participate in the Challenge. To view the Yamkovenko’s winning submission, a video of them presenting it at The Economist World in 2013 Festival, and profiles of all the Challenge finalists, please click here.

We saw an advertisement in The Economist for the Data Visualization Challenge sponsored by Nielsen and The Economist. The focus of the Challenge was to analyze a data set provided by Nielsen and to tell a story using data visualization. I am a journalist and have also done graphic design in the past, so I knew I could handle the visual story telling. Bogdan is a researcher and assistant professor with an affinity for statistics, which means that he could easily handle the data analysis.

Bogdan and I have been married for six years and had never previously collaborated professionally on a project. This Data Visualization Challenge was a great opportunity for us to combine our skills and, ultimately, be competitive.

We began our work on the Challenge with a brainstorm about the Nielsen global dataset, which consisted of the Nielsen Global Consumer Confidence Index and other data about consumer spending and purchasing habits. We decided to supplement the dataset with other widely available economic indicators (such as unemployment rates). We noticed that countries that had high confidence in their economies were not necessarily the best performing economies.

When working on my master’s degree in journalism, I developed an appreciation for my profession’s role as the “fourth estate.” As we looked at the confidence index, we noticed that countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt had high confidence, but their economies weren’t doing that great. We wondered whether democracy was playing a role in the citizens’ confidence. We decided to include the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index in our analysis, and found that countries with the highest confidence also had the most restricted press. This finding gave us a compelling story to tell and gave the original Nielsen dataset more context and depth. (more…)

Dear Seekers & Solvers –

As we enter 2013, we would like to thank you – our Seekers and Solvers alike – for your continued support of InnoCentive. We achieved great things with your help, and anticipate growing momentum this year. But, before looking forward to 2013, let’s take a few moments to consider the past year and recap our journey together.

This year has been exciting and groundbreaking in many ways: Our global Solver network grew to over 275,000 creative and diverse minds, we crossed the 1,500 threshold in external Challenges posted to our network, and we exceeded $13 million in total awards paid out to our Solvers. Additionally, our Seekers – and their Challenges – grew more diverse in 2012 due to the increased use of Challenges in industries such as aerospace, financial services, healthcare, and the public sector. Further, the adoption of “Big Data” Prodigy Challenges among our Seekers (e.g., Cleveland Clinic and Prize4Life) saw explosive growth. All of these trends mean exciting new opportunities for Seekers and Solvers alike in 2013!

Our mission has always been to help address and resolve problems that matter, so we have been fortunate to have worked with incredible organizations that ask the world to address global concerns and make extraordinary things happen. We – the collective “we” which includes Seekers, Solvers, and InnoCentive – helped Prize4Life to better predict the progression of disease in ALS patients. We announced the conclusion of the “Global Giveback Challenge Series,” a collaboration between InnoCentive, GlobalGiving, and the Rockefeller Foundation to find solutions to dire water-related problems in developing countries. And we helped BeyondPolio find novel ideas for reducing the cost of using inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) to help in the final stages of the global polio eradication effort. There are many more examples, but suffice to say, we still firmly believe in changing the world, one Challenge at a time.

As many of you know, we kicked the year off with our acquisition of OmniCompete, a firm based in London that specializes in Grand Challenges and is best known for its long-running Global Security Challenge. This acquisition also enabled us to expand our presence in the United Kingdom and Europe. Prior to this acquisition, in December 2011, we announced a strategic alliance with Booz Allen Hamilton to bring to market integrated, full-service open innovation and Challenge offerings to both commercial enterprises and public sector agencies. (more…)

Dr. Torsten Hothorn has been on quite a run lately working on Prodigy “Big Data” Challenges. Recently, he won the $30,000 Cleveland Clinic Challenge, Build an Efficient Pipeline to Find the Most Powerful Predictors, and he earned a $10,000 award for his second place finish in The DREAM-Phil Bowen ALS Prediction Prize4Life Challenge. (We recently profiled Lilly Fang, a member of one of the two first place winning teams for the Prize4Life Challenge, and also posted a Seeker Spotlight featuring Prize4Life’s Neta Zach which dives into the background of the Challenge and final results). We’re happy to have Dr. Hothorn here to discuss his experience with these important Challenges.

I am a Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Statistics at the University of Munich, Germany, and I’m interested in both methodological developments and applications of statistical models in medicine and biology. Research and teaching in Biostatistics ideally brings together practical problems and statistical theory. While I mainly teach students of statistics, I enjoy working with scientists from fields as diverse as oncology, ecology, and forestry. Because a statistical model is only useful when it actually can be applied to gain insights into aspects of data that otherwise would remain hidden, I spend a lot of time developing and implementing new statistical models. Some open source software packages to which I contributed are distributed via CRAN, the R package repository.

Developing statistical software always means pushing forward existing functionality. One of the best and most effective ways to find out where improvements are needed most is to work on the solution of practical problems, apply the software, and look at the results. While I’m not short of collaborators with interesting problems, I decided to give one of the Cleveland Clinic Challenges hosted by InnoCentive a shot when I first learned about InnoCentive in the Fall of 2011. In 2004 and 2006, I authored two scholarly papers about nonparametric survival models that also work in the presence of numerous potentially predictive variables. The Cleveland Clinic Challenge, “Build an Efficient Pipeline to Find the Most Powerful Predictors,” was an exact match for the models that I developed and described in these two papers. Luckily, I had already invested a fair amount of time into a software implementation, using the R add-on package “party,” and thus the solution was (almost) at my fingertips.

I must admit that “The DREAM-Phil Bowen ALS Prediction Prize4Life Challenge” was a little more challenging than I first thought. With the patient data coming from different clinical trials, it took a while to compile the data into a format suitable for statistical analysis. The relatively complex longitudinal structure of the data, the expected weak association between predictor variables and ALS disease progression, and the large amount of missing values in some of the potentially interesting predictor variables suggested that a nonparametric regression approach (e.g., random forests), might be a good candidate for a potential solution. However, the Challenge data gave me a hard time predicting ALS disease progression with good accuracy. Eventually, I went back and started from scratch. First, I slightly reformulated the Challenge objective by using an alternative statistical measure for describing the disease progression of a patient. In a second step, I collected as much information as I could about the disease progression in the first three months in which a patient was under observation. I observed that using these variables as predictors of the new ALS disease progression measure lead to better performing models.

Besides my interest in applying software that I developed and the thrill of competing with people from all over the world in this prediction Challenge – the InnoCentive leaderboard is really something one can get addicted to – I look forward to using the PRO-ACT database (a subset of which the Prize4Life Challenge was based on) in the classroom. Next spring, I’ll teach longitudinal data analysis and I intend to let my students work with the ALS patient data. That way, my students will be constantly reminded what the models and formulae presented on the blackboard are actually good for and what scientific obligation to society actually means to a statistician.