Perspectives on Innovation

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

By Simon Schneider, General Manager, Grand Challenges & Head of EMEA, InnoCentive

In the wake of the global financial crisis and ongoing challenges facing the world economy, companies, government agencies, and non-profits need new ways of funding large prizes. There are many instances where organizations come to us with grand problems, but lack the finances to put up the entirety of the substantial prize money they would need. So can we find a new way to fund Grand Challenges?

We’ve started to explore this question by breaking it down one piece at a time, each of which we’ll explore in a white paper. There are of course many different features of the current funding environment, so our first step has been to narrow it down very specifically. We’ve decided to look at what has happened to one of the traditional financiers of early stage projects: Venture Capitalists (VCs).

Driven by the recession, VCs are increasingly financing later stage (and lower risk) projects. This is going to affect many of the projects that our Grand Challenge clients are looking for – as they often need to be launched from the very early stages of development, and look for the crazy, risky ideas to solve a problem that the usual ideas have not been able to solve. Can we draw VCs back into the earlier stages, and into the projects that our clients are looking for?

The idea, which we’ve explored in a recent white paper, is to make a trade. VCs have initial capital, but are also looking to identify profitable opportunities. Prize competitions are an effective tool for generating a lot of great ideas and picking out the best ones, but might lack the initial capital input required in certain Grand Challenge cases. So our concept, Prize Venture, makes a trade of initial capital for identified ventures.

Our white paper has only been a first step in taking this concept forward. We’re already working with some partners to put this theory into application by combining venture capital and prize competitions. One thing that has already become clear is that it is better suited to some industries than others.

There is clearly a lot of potential for such a  model, but it should not be applied to every problem and every field. Our new white paper series is set to explore other aspects of the investment environment, so that we can keep building up a bigger picture of where new funding ideas can fit together with prize competitions. Take a deeper look at the white paper, and keep an eye out as we share more of our findings.

By Alph Bingham

This blog is the final installation of a four part series:  ”The Profound Importance of Challenges,” by Dwayne Spradlin and Alph Bingham, authors of The Open Innovation Marketplace, published in 2011 by FT Press.  To read the previous posts, click on the links below:

The Profound Importance of Challenges (Part 1 of 4) by Alph Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin

The Profound Importance of Challenges: The Fundamental Unit of Problem Solving (Part 2 of 4) by Alph Bingham

The Profound Importance of Challenges: A Better Way to Organize and Distribute Work (Part 3 of 4) by Dwayne Spradlin

In this last segment of the series, we will address the role of a Challenge as an instrument of strategy.

Too often organizations measure their innovation success by % of sales spent on R&D, how many patents they own, or whether the leading academics in their fields are on retainer. However, in today’s economy, these should all matter much less to the management of the organization or to the shareholders than whether they can get a new product to market before the competition and dominate the category or whether resources are being managed to ensure the firm can aggressively pursue new business opportunities when they emerge.

Too many organizations struggle to even clearly define their problems and goals, much less to innovate with the precision and efficiency needed to compete in the world today. Whether building better business processes or designing new technologies to dominate a market, traditional business practices are no longer sufficient. Nowhere is this truer than in large corporations where years of accumulated standard operating procedures, poorly aligned incentives, ever-increasing bureaucracy, and entrenched culture work together to ensure that increasingly expensive and mediocre innovation is the best they can do. The existing systems are failing and firms are in desperate need of new methods to improve responsiveness and competitiveness.

Dictionary.com defines a “challenge” as “a summons to engage in any contest” or as “a job or undertaking that is stimulating to one engaged in it.” However, it is much more. Well-constructed “challenges” are an astonishingly powerful and uniquely effective tool for focusing the energies of multitudes of creative, inventive, talented audiences on the important problems facing organizations, nations, and the planet on which we live. These audiences can be employees, customers, partners, and a planet of resources. (more…)

We are excited to announce the addition of OmniCompete to the InnoCentive family.  Best known for its annual Global Security Challenge, OmniCompete has executed nearly two dozen high profile Challenges throughout its history in the areas of security, energy, healthcare, and cloud computing.  This addition helps create a richer portfolio of offerings for customers and exciting opportunities for both InnoCentive and OmniCompete Solvers.

We asked Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of InnoCentive, and Simon Schneider, CEO of OmniCompete, to share their thoughts on the acquisition and what it means for Seekers, Solvers and the overall open innovation landscape.

Why did InnoCentive acquire OmniCompete?

Dwayne:

OmniCompete has played a significant role in establishing the Grand Challenge category – finding big solutions to daunting, world changing problems.   Under Simon’s leadership, they’ve done very well.  They’ve been aggressively expanding their name and presence in Grand Challenges and building their business in the United States and Europe.  Their heritage in security, the leadership they bring to Grand Challenges, combined with InnoCentive’s Challenge platform; capabilities and experience create substantial value for our customers.  Culturally, the OmniCompete and InnoCentive teams share the same vision of innovation being transformative for organizations.  There’s a tremendous coming together of the minds that is good for companies and customers – it’s good for everyone.  It was an easy decision from our end.
Simon:

Simon:

As the prize industry matures, we’ve noticed that clients are becoming better informed and increasingly requesting specialized services. At OmniCompete, we’re very good at these front-end services: custom consulting, design, marketing and branding, but we need to reach more Solvers. This is where InnoCentive excels, so the joining of our companies will mean a one stop shop for clients.  Our work is about problem-solving, and above all we are client-driven, so with this acquisition our whole team is looking forward to being able to give our clients more. It’s never an easy decision to sell a company that you started from nothing, but we see this as the beginning of a lifelong partnership, rather than an exit.

What does the acquisition mean for Solvers? (more…)

By Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of InnoCentive

This blog is the third installation of a four part series: ”The Profound Importance of Challenges,” by Dwayne Spradlin and Alph Bingham, authors of The Open Innovation Marketplace, published in 2011 by FT Press.

To read the other posts in this series, click on the links below:

The Profound Importance of Challenges (Part 1 of 4) by Alph Bingham and Dwayne Spradlin

The Profound Importance of Challenges: The Fundamental Unit of Problem Solving (Part 2 of 4) by Alph Bingham

The Profound Importance of Challenges: A Powerful Strategy Tool (Part 4 of 4) by Dwayne Spradlin

In our book “The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise” published this year by FT Press, Alph Bingham and I explored Open Innovation and the Challenge Driven Enterprise. As we continue our discussion of Challenges and why they are profoundly important in this four part series, we turn our attention now to Challenges as a better way to organize and distribute work.

There are many kinds of work. There’s work on the assembly line, analyzing water for impurities, delivering newspapers, and fighting wars. And loosely speaking, Challenges may have a role to play in all these kinds of activities. And there is a different kind of more intellectual work requiring more creativity and invention, whereby a need is identified and a solution sought. Examples include development of a marketing strategy, a new plastic material for manufacturing, or an innovative approach to engaging customers.

In this latter kind of work, well-defined Challenges represent a powerful tool for organizing human activity and motivating innovative outcomes.

Organizations have spent years defining efficient organizational forms, writing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), crafting job descriptions, and even developing robust platforms for planning and tracking work. And they are becoming more efficient. Use of contract labor and outsourcing of work, even whole functions, is more commonplace than ever. These approaches have often improved the bottom lines of businesses by increasing flexibility, lowering costs, and enabling projects to be accelerated. However with notable exceptions, these exercises in efficiency and shifting labor costs have done little to fundamentally change the rules of the game—to create anything like a “step change” in business performance and breakthrough innovation. In most instances, the 20th-century approach is essentially institutionalized resource planning and labor arbitrage that is simply commoditizing work and trading high cost labor for lower cost alternatives. It is not creating a unique competitive advantage. And it is certainly not tapping the creative capacity of organizations and the world to innovate. In some cases, it has actually achieved the opposite effect. Consider how many companies arguably lost their innovative edge by focusing so singularly on cost reduction that they lost the very resources and capabilities needed to be competitive over time (for example, Dell, General Motors). Some even created their next generation competition by turning their suppliers and partners into the only true sources of innovation (for example, semiconductors). (more…)