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.

Ben Skowera is the winner of The Economist-InnoCentive Transparency Challenge.

I am an Associate at SEI Investments in Oaks, Pennsylvania, where I’m currently working on the online software development team performing quality assurance and business analysis for our products. My past projects at SEI have also included web product strategy, international new service development, project management, and operational process improvement. I graduated from Lehigh University in 2009 with a B.S. in Industrial Engineering and a minor in Economics.

I first learned of InnoCentive through a news article about technology and innovation and I decided to sign up. Shortly after, I came across The Economist-InnoCentive Transparency Challenge in one of the site’s weekly Challenge Bulletins. The Challenge tasked Solvers with developing an innovative way to utilize technology to drive transparency in the government. With the upcoming presidential elections and the political turmoil occurring throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa, I thought this topic was both extremely relevant and important.

I believe having a basic knowledge of the government, political processes, and current political events is a very important part of anyone’s involvement in government and politics. After performing research into how people obtain information about their governments, I came to the conclusion that there wasn’t a sufficient way to truly understand the impact that political decisions have on us and our values and how well our elected officials are representing us over time. This is why I proposed my solution of creating a website that delivers personal and easy-to-understand, value-based political analysis by utilizing technologies and techniques used in online dating, social networking, and metric-based dashboard design.

As part of the award, I traveled to the Ideas Economy: Innovation 2012 event in Berkeley, California, where I was interviewed on stage by Matthew Bishop, US Business Editor and New York Bureau Chief of The Economist. The experience was incredible and so was the opportunity to meet and speak with some of the amazing people that attended the event. [editor note: to see Ben’s interview at the event, click on the link above]

By connecting organizations with problems to Solvers that reside outside of specific localities or the four walls of typical organization, I believe InnoCentive is creating a great opportunity for both people and organizations to take advantage of the tremendous knowledge the world has to offer. As more and more people connect due to the expansion of technology and the internet, I believe InnoCentive has developed a great way to bring together everyone’s ideas and create a global community to solve the world’s biggest problems.

I wish the best of luck to all future InnoCentive Solvers.

Mike Cirella recently won the Cleveland Clinic Challenge: Implantable Micro-sensor for Displacement & Mechanical Load. Previously, he received awards for three Challenges: Thresholds for Perception of Color Differences, Manufacturing of a Porous Film, and Task Light Charging.

Open innovation (OI) is a powerful platform that fosters creative thinking about problems that may be far outside a Solver’s daily routine. It provides an opportunity to apply diverse experiences that often lead to solutions never before considered. So often the ‘dumb’ questions are not asked by individuals studying problems from the perspective of someone inside an organization. The power of OI is much like a brainstorming session, where no question or suggested solution is off limits, thereby opening up the possibilities for a truly creative, even unique, solution.

It is precisely for these reasons that I am an active Solver. I have submitted many more proposed solutions than I have won, but each effort leads me down a new path and expands my knowledge for the next Challenge. The process allows me to ask “why not” instead of “why,” or worse, not ask at all since it is so far outside the normal approach.

For me, the common thread that links my winning solutions is the “Eureka moment” I experience after reading the Challenge description the first time and relate it to a past experience and solution to a problem in an entirely different field. Of course, many hours of research, organizing and fine-tuning my submission follows that moment, but the creative idea is formed by thinking laterally; searching my experience database for a tool or method that can be applied to a problem in a completely different area.

The Task Light Charging (aka Bogolight) Challenge sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation triggered my memory of how modern coin acceptors in vending machines function reliably in harsh environments by eliminating moving parts that wear and corrode. Since the task light required a rugged, off-grid method for re-charging its batteries that supplemented the existing photocell method, I applied wind and water power, converted to electricity via permanent magnets spinning past induction coils embedded in a plastic housing. No metal parts exposed and high inherent reliability.

The Manufacturing of a Porous Film Challenge had an obvious solution (to me) by applying methods used in the paper and plastics web production industries. Again, a past life experience at a company that manufactured polarizers for sunglasses prompted me to apply my knowledge of web rollers and controls and create a simple, inexpensive solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Subhabrata Sen and GVK Bioscience, the company where he works, have won five Novel Molecule Challenges in less than one year, and are currently working on four more.  The largest request he received was for over 100 compounds! Subhabrata became a Solver in 2009.

I’m an associate director specializing in parallel medicinal chemistry at GVK Bioscience, a contract research organization in Hyderabad, India. I was born in Kolkata, India, where I grew up very interested in science. My hobbies include painting (acrylic on canvas), reading, and collecting currencies of different countries.

GVK Bioscience is an extremely innovation-driven company, so we – particularly Dr. Balaram Patro, our senior vice president, and myself – were intrigued by InnoCentive’s Novel Molecule Challenges (NMC) program as another means of acquiring business for our company. The NMC program complemented our division’s core strength: combinatorial library design and synthesis of biologically active compounds. InnoCentive’s NMC program offers a new way of solving problems for companies by reaching out to an extensive audience of different backgrounds. At the end, innovation propagates and promotes the progress of our society and it’s very gratifying to be part of it.

Our library design and synthesis department designs and synthesize the compounds we upload for NMC challenges. Apart from initial guidelines from the Seeker, we utilize our in-house software to understand the synthetic feasibility of the molecules before uploading them to the InnoCentive platform. We also work toward novel routes for these compounds which can provide us access to a variety of molecules with new substituents pertaining to the scaffolds.

Being a son of a chemical engineer and a physics professor, I have followed my passion for science to the fullest. I obtained a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, mentored by Dr. Shon R Pulley, who first helped me realize the importance of innovation in science. I then had a fantastic opportunity to pursue post-doctoral studies with Dr. Albert I. Meyers at Colorado State University who truly expanded my scientific horizons. While working there, my belief in innovation strengthened all the more. I realized it was an integral aspect of science, and I began looking for applications of my scientific knowledge in industry. I developed my core competencies in combinatorial chemistry and natural product synthesis.

Following my post-doctoral studies, I have held a number of industrial positions. I initially joined Chemocentryx Inc., a biotech company located in the San Francisco Bay area in California.  After a couple of years and several patents, I returned to India in 2004. Since then I have worked for contract research organizations like Syngene, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and the chemical company, BASF-India.