Perspectives on Innovation

Imagine that you invited a contractor to your house and asked him to paint a wall in your dining room blue.  The contractor arrives, looks at the wall and says: “No way, you should paint it pink.”  He thinks for a moment and adds: “Actually, you don’t need this wall at all.  Tear it down!”  He then looks around and suggests: “Better yet, sell this house and buy a new one.”

Sounds strange, doesn’t it?  Well…a couple of months ago, I posted a Challenge for a Seeker who was making a product from Material A.  In order to improve the quality of this product, the Seeker wanted to replace Material A with another material.  A good number of proposals had been submitted in response.  Some Solvers argued that Material B could do the job; some Solvers pointed to Material C; some Solvers suggested taking a careful look at Material D.

But there was one Solver who claimed that there was no need to replace Material A in the first place, because the Seeker would be better off with throwing away his product and replacing it with the product that the Solver had proposed.  When I tried to argue that the Challenge was about a new material and not a new product, the Solver insisted that his solution was of “out-of-the-box” type.  The Solver has also politely intimated that, perhaps, the Seeker simply didn’t know “what he needs.”

I have to admit that this wasn’t the first time in my practice that Solvers implied that a Seeker didn’t know “what he needs.”  So, let me speak a few words in defense of our Seekers.    (more…)

As many of you may remember, in November 2008 InnoCentive ran an ideation Challenge looking for ideas for redesigning the InnoCentive website. The Challenge’s Summary stated: “InnoCentive is inviting Solvers to join its efforts in redesigning our website. We are asking Solvers to provide us with innovative and creative new design elements that we might integrate into the final website design.”

Now that the Challenge has wrapped, I asked the Challenge owner, Gabriel Eichler of InnoCentive Client Services, to tell us a bit about the results, and about his experience as a Seeker.

Gabe, how many Solvers did you award for this Challenge?

In the end we awarded three Solvers for contributions that were extremely impressive – both in terms of their creativity and the sheer amount of effort that they demonstrated.

Can you describe the winning submissions?

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by Elly Madrigal, Client Operations Manager

 Due to a high demand from Solvers, InnoCentive has launched another form of communication to allow Solvers and Seekers discuss Topics around a specific Challenge.  You may have noticed that there is a new button on the IAVI Challenge, “Functional envelope trimer of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus” (located under the Global Health Pavillion), called “Discuss Challenge”.  Specific Topic areas in this forum include: (1) an Introduction to IAVI, (2) Funding, (3) Collaboration, (4) Prizes, and (5) Confidentiality, plus any other Topics that you may want to discuss.  We invite you to take a look at the forum and add to the discussion if you have any questions or comments around the Challenge and/or the IAVI organization. 

For those of you that have not been involved in a Forum, it is basically a message board for Solvers and Seekers to communicate with each other.  Typically, information is communicated in one direction, through the Challenge posting and Press Releases.  However, with the Challenge Forum, Solvers can now ask questions directly to the Seekers, but with some caveats…..we’ll get into those caveats below.

For those of you that have been involved in a Forum, please no trolling, spamming, flaming, baiting, sock puppeting, double posting, or foul language.  You’ve seen it before.  (more…)

I have some exciting news to share with you today.  As a result of all your feedback last year, we have multiple website updates planned this year.  The first update is now live and appears in the “My InnoCentive” area of the website.  For Solvers, this is the section of the website you see once you’ve logged in.  We focused on 5 key changes that we hope will make the website easier to use and more informative: (more…)

Hello.  My name is Elly Madrigal, and I am the Client Operations Manager at InnoCentive.  What does that mean?  Every day, I receive new orders for Challenges, review them, assign them to one of our Team members, establish metrics and statistics on our various delivery and success rates, and review these results with our Management and Clients (otherwise known as Seekers).

Since Solvers on our site have limited ability to view the “Big Picture” of the Challenge Lifecycle, I thought I’d paint that picture for you from my point of view.  The Challenge is not magically created and emailed to us from these big pocketed Companies (although I wish they were!)  They do require a significant amount of development time between InnoCentive Team members and the Seeker Challenge Owners (usually Scientists or Technical Managers).  In addition, there is a significant amount of time spent by the InnoCentive Team and the Challenge Owners reviewing your Submissions.  Solvers do not see this happening in the background, so I thought I’d tell you what we do when we’re not answering your questions or sending updates on your Submission.

We’ve arranged this process into 3 phases each with specific milestones and deliverables that mark the beginning and end of each phase.  Let me apologize in advance for the Project Management lingo, but I can’t help it.  So let’s dive in…..

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