Perspectives on Innovation

In 2010 we announced the Global Giveback Challenge Series – an exciting 3 phase partnership with GlobalGiving, a peer-to-peer philanthropy marketplace, and the Rockefeller Foundation to crowdsource solutions to problems facing vulnerable communities.  We are excited to be entering phase 3 of the series:

Phase One: Identify dire problems that could be solved via the InnoCentive Global Solver Community.  Global Giving crowdsourced ideas from its then 800-partner membership.

Phase Two: From the submissions, four water-related Challenges were developed and posted to the InnoCentive Challenge Platform, and awards of up to $40,000 per Challenge were offered by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Phase Three: Crowdfund implementation of the solutions.  The Challenges and their solutions are now posted to GlobalGiving for funding. For the month of February, The Rockefeller Foundation is matching every donation 200%.

More information on each of the projects is below.  This is a rare opportunity to see InnoCentive sourced solutions through to implementation.  To donate to one of these projects, please visit the Global Giveback Funding Challenge page

1. Design of an easy-to-use method to purify water from Lake Victoria in Uganda, making it safe to drink. Proposed by the EDGE project, this Challenge sought a way to provide 100 homes with water filters that would improve upon current filtration systems for the cost of one gallon of bottled water in the developed world. Submitted by Chris Schulz, an environmental engineer from Denver, Colorado, the winning design is simple, low-cost, user-friendly, and effective against almost all bacteria, protozoa, and some viruses. EDGE will assemble and distribute filters to their partner community in Uganda this summer, allowing hundreds of individuals to go about life without fear of intestinal disease and parasites, empowering people to break the bonds of abject poverty.
2. Sunlight/UV-light Dose Indicator. Proposed by Fundacion SODIS in Bolivia, this Challenge sought a visual sign of water that had been exposed to a sufficient dose of sunlight or UV-light for disinfection. A team of four graduate students from the University of Washington developed the winning solution: a solar disinfectant indicator that is self‐contained, self‐powered, low‐cost, durable, and reusable. Composed of off‐the‐shelf components and proven technology, the indicator should withstand a minimum of 10 years of use.
3. Design of a low cost Rainwater Harvesting Storage Tank for a Wetland Region in Kerala India. Proposed by Rainwater for Humanity, this solution was provided by Mario Rosato, who also won an award for his solution to The Economist-InnoCentive Challenge, The Capture of Atmospheric Carbon to Address Global Warming. Rosato proposed a rainwater catchment tank that could be constructed of panels made from bamboo fiber, coconut husks, or other vegetable fiber conglomerated with cement. Implementation of this solution has the potential of reducing the cost of rainwater harvesting by 60 percent.
4. Small-scale River Turbines for communities along the Amazon River. Proposed by Green Empowerment, this Challenge sought a design for a river turbine to generate power for villages, schools, and medical centers in the Amazonian jungle in Peru. Alain Lemyre, a weather forecaster from Quebec, provided the winning design: an improved river turbine model that is appropriate for the region, technically and economically accessible, and constructed with materials available in developing countries.

If you like this post, please follow us on Twitter.

Chris Wilmer has been awarded for two Challenges – Synthetic DNA Management Software and Water Problems Affecting People in Developing Countries.

Science is a noble pursuit, and I would pay to be a scientist if I had to. You can imagine how lucky I feel then, that the payment works the other way around.

Designing porous materials for carbon dioxide capture and hydrogen storage is my Ph.D. research at Northwestern University in the department of Chemical & Biological Engineering. My advisor, Professor Randall Q. Snurr, has helped me tremendously to become a specialist in molecular simulations and a super-computer systems administrator. These skills, simulations, programming and systems architecture, have been invaluable when approaching InnoCentive Challenges. As the speed of computers increases, there are fewer and fewer materials science and chemistry problems that cannot be better understood by a properly designed computer simulation.

While my current research is in Chicago, I was born in Canada, and I have a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from the University of Toronto. Biology and bioengineering are my hobby sciences, which I pursue (or just read about) in my spare time. Greater exposure to these fields is one of the benefits that draws me to InnoCentive.

I have been participating regularly in humanitarian and bio-related InnoCentive challenges since August, 2009. It is enlightening to read about contemporary problems in the variety of industries to which InnoCentive caters (which as far as I can tell, is every conceivable industry short of the military), and it is also fun to attempt to solve them! I have found that, while it is difficult to come up with a great idea, it is usually easy to make a half-decent suggestion… and sometimes that’s enough!

I would like to see InnoCentive provide additional services to help Solvers and ultimately lead to better solutions for the Seekers (e.g., providing mock solutions to the Solver community that preserved the average number of typographical errors of actual winning solutions). I’m glad that InnoCentive is so successful already, and I’m sure that as it evolves it will become much more successful in the future!

If you are a would-be Solver but are unsure of how to go about it, please feel free to send me an e-mail. I have a wide variety of interests, and am always excited to collaborate on a project!

Best regards and good luck

-Chris