Perspectives on Innovation

We recently announced that InnoCentive and The Economist were forming a partnership to solve some of the most critical problems facing mankind.  To kick off this partnership, InnoCentive founder Alph Bingham was invited to present at The Economist’s Ideas Economy series at the University of California, Berkeley.  The video of his speech has just been published and, as usual, Alph provides a compelling view of open innovation, set in the context of a few individual Solver stories.

Alph points out in his speech that “Some problems are too important to leave to the experts.” and presents some interesting information about where solutions actually come from.  Interesting to note is that, based on research from Harvard professor Karim Lakhani, on average, women are more successful at solving Challenges than men.  He also discusses the current trend toward Solvers creating teams to work together on problems.

Click on the presentation above to hear more from Alph.

InnoCentive has recently launched a special initiative to help organizations in the non-profit and public sectors solve a myriad of social problems.

Here’s how it works.  Throughout 2010, InnoCentive will waive its typical posting fee for a single Challenge for selected organizations working to make a difference for the ‘public good’.  As with our traditional Challenges, the organization will identify the Challenge, cover the prize amount and support a media campaign to ensure broad participation.  But InnoCentive will provide its services for free.

‘Public Good’ Challenges get the same access to our diverse Solver community, bringing new thinking and expertise to problems facing communities worldwide.

The Chicago Chamber of Commerce recently completed a ‘Public Good’ Challenge that dramatically increased mass transit ridership.  A U.K.-based non-profit is drafting a Challenge in the education arena.  And we are working with an international medical research foundation on a Challenge focused on childhood disease.  The possibilities are endless.

What’s in it for you?  More Challenges mean more opportunities for our Solvers, and the ‘Public Good’ Challenges represent a whole new range of issues and problems to tackle.

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This article originally appeared on Steve Shapiro’s 24/7 Innovation blog.

A magazine asked me to write a book review of Innovation Tournaments by Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich. The book arrived in the mail yesterday and I immediately turned to the index to see if InnoCentive was listed. Sure enough, we are mentioned in several places in the book.

This got me thinking: Is InnoCentive a tournament?

The word tournament is derived from the French word for “medieval sport” and is now used to describe a wide variety of competitions.

Most competitions/tournaments are quite entertaining.  And by their very nature, there is always a winner.  One could argue that tournaments are “spectacles designed to find a champion.”

Given this widely held point-of-view, using the word tournament as a descriptor of InnoCentive seems to be inaccurate.

The NCAA basketball championships are a tournament.  The “World Series of Poker” is a tournament.  American Idol is a tournament.  With each of these, there is always a winner.  The purpose of the tournament is to find that winner while (usually) providing entertainment value.

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Anything with the word “NASA” attached to it instantly conjures up phrases of “rocket science”, “aerospace engineers”, “scientists” and “astronauts”. But many of you may also imagine “Star Trek” and “Star Wars”, works of imagination and science fiction, as far removed from the reality and practicality of the scientific and technologically advanced aura of NASA as can be. Or are they? NASA is about space exploration, the need to discover the unknown and to create the instruments and vehicles to make such exploration happen. But before such technologies can exist, you need imagination, ideas, creativity, innovation, and dreams.

Such is the beauty of the TEDxNASA event, where aerospace engineers, musicians, artists, authors, innovation consultants and neuroscientists come together to explore what it means to be creative and innovative. Steve Shapiro, our VP of Strategic Consulting, was one of the presenters to speak about innovation. His session was titled “Open Innovation for Rocket Scientists”

This six-minute presentation is packed with humor, insightfulness and a compelling argument for looking outside your area of expertise for the big breakthrough solutions to your problems: someone else may have solved your challenge. He cites an example where he asked a printer cartridge company “Who has solved this problem,” the problem being, “Who has sent something to the customer and they have returned it?” The answer, when you see the video, was a little unconventional.

Steve’s session reminds us about the power of experiences. It is not always those with the traditional educational qualifications and expertise who have all the answers, but those that have had experiences in similar scenarios and the ability to connect the two seemingly divergent situations who can contribute to the solution. The key, Steve stresses, is to make connections to different areas. Creative people are those who have more experiences and ideas and are able to connect the “dots”. Some of the most creative solutions really aren’t rocket science.

Last week, Michael Arndt from the Next Innovation Tools & Trends blog on BusinessWeek.com, posted an article asking “Is Open Innovation Over?” The crux of the post is an interview with James Todhunter, CTO of Invention Machine, who says “Open Innovation” is “becoming yesterday’s idea”. Todhunter’s argument was that companies’ internal knowledge-base would dwindle if they relied too much on external ideas and expertise, and run the risk of losing control of their IP rights and thus their competitive edge.

I mention this post because it elicited a bee’s-hive of comments criticizing Todhunter’s views, especially as they (the commenter’s) felt he hadn’t produced any viable examples to demonstrate his opinion. The commenter’s were rather passionate in their views and didn’t hesitate in listing why they felt Open Innovation, as one noted, “will become a natural component of companies’ innovation strategies.” Of note, and personal pride I might add, is an InnoCentive Solver, Chris DeArmitt, who chimes in his defense of Open Innovation in the comments, opening his statement with “As an innovator and two-time Innocentive challenge winner….”

Read the Next Innovation Tools & Trends blog post, http://bit.ly/5i0y22, and let both Michael Arndt and us know your opinion.