Perspectives on Innovation

Ivan Skachko won the InnoCentive Challenge Mechanical Joint with High Ultrasound Conductivity.

PhD in Physics, Rutgers University, NJ, USA
MS in Physics Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Moscow, Russia

Starting from high school I faced the dilemma whether to become an engineer or a physicist. I chose the latter because it seemed to me essential to get a good understanding of physical laws for either path. Eventually I understood that my true passion is designing and building things as well as solving engineering challenges. While these inclinations were of some value in my career as experimental condensed matter physicist, I was never able to apply them to a full extent. The difficulty I faced when trying to switch to something more applied, is that the employers were usually seeking for a set specific relevant skills. My assumption — that with a solid background in physics I can do anything — seemed to be disproved.

And then, reading Nature journals, I noticed InnoCentive Challenges. These I can just play with! Ideation (I did not know such word exists) is what I often tend to do. I picked the Challenge “Mechanical Joint with High Ultrasound Conductivity“ because even though I had no direct experience with ultrasonic waves, the wave phenomena are very similar whether they are electromagnetic waves or sound. I was majoring in optics as an undergraduate, and was using radio-frequencies in my PhD work. I also have interest in mechanical engineering: I greatly enjoy working in machine shop or repairing my car or doing CAD. Surely I learnt a great deal about ultrasound while working on the Challenge.

I think that it is not a specific expertise that is crucial for solving problems but a special connection that is created between Solver and the Challenge. I am eagerly anticipating my next Challenge on InnoCentive.

Patrick Fuller recently won the Nitrate Capture System Challenge sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund.

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University, collaboratively working on a variety of computational and experimental projects. This work ranges from green energy to catalysis, but all of my projects share one common goal: improving the global standard of living through the design of applied technology.

As an undergraduate at Lehigh University, I discovered my interest in creating “actionable” technology while researching improvements in orthopedic implants. The work in itself was very interesting, but I noticed that there was no infrastructure available to aid in converting successful research into commercial products. To fill this niche, I worked toward and obtained a second degree in finance. This skillset has helped me immensely over the last few years, and I have already found myself useful as a bridge between scientific and business communities.

I learned about InnoCentive through Chris Wilmer, another Ph.D candidate in my department. Come to think of it, this all probably started because his lab has an excellent coffee machine. Weird how that works.

This was my first challenge, which I took up within a few days of discovering InnoCentive. I have since considered a variety of other challenges—even working on experimental data for some—but have only submitted one other solution.

I was immediately drawn toward the nitrate capture problem posed by the Environmental Defense Fund. While my academic background helped, most of the inspiration came from my upbringing. I was raised in a coastal New England town, where oceanography was a large portion of our grade school education. This was coupled with my experience in high school of working in a produce market, where I met farmers using nitrate-consuming algae to fertilize their crops. Following this up with some elementary reaction kinetics, I was able to devise a theoretical solution to nitrate capture. I have since been in contact with the Environmental Defense Fund, and I hope to work with them in testing and implementing my idea!

Corinne Le Buhan was recently selected as the winner of The Economist-Innocentive Human Potential Index Challenge. In addition to the $10,000 award, Corinne was invited to present her solution at The Economist Ideas Economy: Human Potential conference in New York in September 2011. You can view her full solution here, and her presentation here.

How did you hear about InnoCentive and why did you become an InnoCentive Solver?

Curiosity brought me to Innocentive in the first place. As a freelance consultant in intellectual property and innovation management, I wanted to better understand how innovation crowdsourcing works in practice and what new opportunities it enables for my customers. This approach is not very well known yet and is often feared because of the loss of control it seems to imply, but that can be addressed with the right framework and process. So, I registered as a Solver to test it… and ended submitting an ideation Challenge on my own simply because it was inspiring me.

Have you attempted other InnoCentive Challenges?

So far, I have not attempted other Innocentive Challlenges, but I did consider a few. It’s a lot of work to compile a good proposal. You need to gather the relevant part of your background knowledge, you need to devote some time to further explore what other solutions already exist elsewhere and enrich your thinking accordingly, and then you still need to articulate your nascent ideas as clearly as possible to formalize a suitable answer to the Challenge requirements. This process is somewhat similar capturing a technical invention into a good patent description and claims… you need significant quiet time to think and write about it! So I can only work on Challenges when I have enough free time left besides my day-to-day business.

What motivated you to work on the Challenge that you ended up winning?

What particularly motivated me to devote extra-hours building an answer to the Human Potential Index Challenge was its larger purpose and meaning than what I’m usually working on. In my humble view, GDP-based metrics are depressing the whole western economies in a schizophrenic way as we grow GDP at the expense of other goals such as environmental preservation. Still, I personally have the opportunity to interact with a number of creative and positive-minded engineers who have not given up their faith in mankind capability to design new technologies, even if sometimes just for the fun of it. So I thought there must be a way to better capture that, as a human potential index measurement, than with GDP-derived metrics, and that where I started from.

What do you like about working on Challenges?

I like working on almost anything, and Challenges are even more rewarding because it is a creative work. I also like more and more being able to connect and share knowledge from very different fields as my life experience and understanding develops. Challenges like the one I submitted provide a very good opportunity to do so.

What would you like to see happen with your solution?

I now try to integrate my proposal into a larger initiative. I’m using the visibility it gave me to connect to other people with the same concerns and hopes on the need for a better human potential development measurement. I think there’s room for further formalism and prototyping from real data in this area, but this requires funding of some sort. Ideas that are not implemented in the end are just ideas, not innovations… that’s nice, but a bit worthless. I hope we can move to the next step, and have already started to connect to other Challengers to evaluate if there’s enough momentum to further build something concrete out of our respective ideas, expertise and networks.

You can read Corinne’s bio at http://www.ipstudies.ch/about/

Last week, InnoCentive Solver Corinne LeBuhan presented her winning solution to the Economist Human Potential Index Challenge at the Economist Human Potential conference in New York. In honor of the event, we reached out to a few Solvers and asked them to send us a video of themselves, talking about what it means to them to be Solvers, and asking them to define “Human Potential”.  The video was shown during InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin’s presentation at the conference.   Enjoy!

Daniel Castro recently won the Economist-InnoCentive Healthcare Information Economy Challenge. This Challenge was part of the Economist Challenge Series and as the winner, Daniel was invited to present his solution at the Economist Ideas Economy Information event, which took place in Santa Clara in June of 2011. Daniel’s winning solution can be viewed here.

I’m a senior analyst at a Washington, DC-based think tank where I work on a variety of policy issues related to information technology. Generally, I look at how different types of public policy can help spur the adoption and use of technology that help improve economic productivity and quality of life. My key focus is on information policy, such as privacy and security, and I am especially interested in how policymakers can help spur more innovation through the use of data.

Before beginning my career at the think tank, I worked at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) where I audited information security controls at various government agencies. Working in government gave me a great opportunity to see how government policies are implemented firsthand, an experience which is invaluable in my current job. My academic background is fairly diverse: I received a B.S. in Foreign Service at Georgetown University before switching gears and obtaining an M.S. in information security from Carnegie Mellon University. I have found that having both strong technical expertise and a background in the liberal arts has given me many opportunities to pursue the projects that most interest me. (more…)