Perspectives on Innovation

In today’s InnoCentive Insider, Peter Lohse talks about the curious fact that many Challenges are awarded to Solvers with expertise outside of the Challenge field.

It has been more than six years since I joined InnoCentive and I continue to be fascinated by the business model and the success we have with delivering solutions to our Clients. Our success rate overall was around 30% at the end of 2005 and is now quickly approaching the 50% mark (on average, for Theoretical and RTP Challenges). We do not have an empirical basis yet for comparing this outcome with the effectiveness of internally focused solution efforts. However, considering that many of the Seekers had been unsuccessful in finding a solution to these problems on their own, I would say the solution rate is quite spectacular.

Much of the praise for this success goes to our Solvers. They are the brains, experimenters and composers behind the winning proposals. The Client Services Team at InnoCentive is in the privileged position to be a first hand witness to our Solvers’ tremendous creativity.  Each of us has seen hundreds of successful submissions, hence we have a pretty good understanding of how a proposal should be formulated to have the potential for winning an award. These learnings are available to all of our Solvers through the InnoCentive newsletter or through this Blog. For example recent postings from my colleagues Lisa Reinhold, Eugene Ivanov and Michael Albarelli provide valuable insights in this regard.  While we believe that Solvers who follow these guidelines will submit proposals which are more likely to be successful, we recognize that factors other than the form of a Solver submission will have an influence on winning an award. It’s some these other factors that I would like to discuss. (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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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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In today’s Client Services blog post, Peter explains why sometimes Challenge statements can seem a bit short on details…

Brevity is the soul of wit …. for the Seeker.

Have you ever wondered about the brevity of the InnoCentive Challenge statements? Isn’t it a little puzzling that Seekers do not provide more detail on the history of their solution efforts? Wouldn’t it be helpful to Solvers if a Seeker would put out all the information they have on a problem?

Yes, I agree: The challenge statements are often scarce of information. And yes, in many cases more background information would help to better characterize the problem and could help Solvers to come up with a better solution.

Well, then why do InnoCentive Challenge statements not include more details on problem background, application and industry? (more…)

Today marks the first in a series of blog posts written by the InnoCentive Client Services team.   As the primary interface to both the Seeker and Solver communities, Client Services is in a unique position to understand what it takes to successfully write and solve an InnoCentive Challenge.  We hope that these posts will be useful to you – and as always we welcome your questions, suggestions and feedback!

The InnoCentive Client Services Team – Who We Are

By Gabriel Eichler
InnoCentive Client Services

For many Solvers, the Client Services team is the virtual face of InnoCentive. We are involved in every aspect of the Challenge lifecycle, from working to define the crux of the problem with Seekers, to answering the questions of inquisitive Solvers and then making that exciting introduction between the winning Solver and appreciative Seeker. With such a wide variety of responsibilities, the InnoCentive Client Services team wears several hats, but that comes naturally to us.

We’re an experienced and diverse bunch. We have a combined total of over 17 years of Open Innovation experience and an average 13 years of R&D intensive industry experience. We have advanced degrees in Chemistry, Biology, Computational Sciences, Engineering and Business. The Client Services team has worked all over the world including Russia, Switzerland, France, Israel, Thailand, Japan, Germany, and even Alaska. On top of that, we collectively speak 7 different languages.

Even considering this diversity, we’ve joined InnoCentive because we believe in the promise of Open Innovation. We not only love to provide exciting Challenges for individuals around the globe but we also believe that the opening of innovation will lead to more and better innovation for all. It is precisely because of this passion that we’re launching this new series of blog entries by the InnoCentive Client Services team. We hope that through the next several months, you’ll get to know us better and our individual passions for Open Innovation will shine through. More importantly, we hope that you can benefit from the insights we share. We have after all seen over 700 Challenges on the InnoCentive Website, so we happen to know a thing or two about what it takes to get the most out of our marketplace. We encourage you to leave comments, ask questions and reach out to any of us if you’d like to join the conversation. Enjoy.