Perspectives on Innovation

We recently announced that JDRF was partnering with InnoCentive to find a better way to treat diabetes using a glucose-responsive insulin drug.  We asked Dr. Sanjoy Dutta, Director of Glucose Control at JDRF to tell us a bit about this Challenge and the overall state of diabetes treatment today.

Thank you for joining us today, Sanjoy.  Can you tell us a little bit about JDRF and the role you play in combating type 1 diabetes?

JDRF is committed to curing, treating, and preventing type 1 diabetes. While we work toward a cure, we strive to help people with type 1 diabetes live better, longer, healthier lives – people at all ages and at all stages of the disease.  They are the reason JDRF exists, and remain at the forefront of everything we do.

A vital part of the fight against type 1 diabetes is developing better treatments to help people live better with the disease while we search for cures and preventions. And that is why JDRF is taking strides to make managing the disease better, safer, more efficient – because it’s not an easy disease to live with.

JDRF is the largest charitable funder and advocate of diabetes science worldwide, and since our founding in 1970, we’ve awarded more than $1.5 billion to diabetes research. In fact, more than 80 percent of JDRF’s expenditures directly support research and research-related education.

Your Challenge is seeking ideas for the development of glucose-responsive insulin.  What is glucose-responsive insulin and what kind of impact would the discovery and development of glucose-responsive insulin have on people with diabetes?

JDRF is utilizing InnoCentive’s Challenge platform to create a tightly controlled, glucose-responsive insulin drug for patients with insulin-dependent diabetes.  This will enable improved glucose control, decrease or eliminate the need to test or monitor blood glucose levels, improve quality of life for people with the disease, and reduce their chances of short- and long-term diabetic complications.

Such a glucose-responsive insulin holds the potential to transform the lives of the hundreds of millions of people with diabetes in the world who are dependent on insulin (both type 1 and type 2). Working only when the body needs it, glucose-responsive insulin would deliver the precise amount of insulin in response to circulating glucose levels, to control and maintain normal blood glucose levels throughout a daily routine, with once-daily or less frequent dosing in people with insulin-dependent diabetes. This novel form of insulin would not need to be calibrated with carbohydrates or blood glucose testing (compared to current administration of insulin multiple times or continuously in a day).

Currently, all insulin treatments for people with diabetes release the same amount of insulin at fixed times throughout the entire body.  However, in people without diabetes, the body secretes insulin in proportion to local blood glucose levels, delivering it to the body’s tissues and organs at the appropriate times, according to their specific needs.  This helps the person without diabetes to maintain a target blood glucose level throughout the day.  Glucose-responsive insulin could therefore be a transformative solution, vastly improving the quality of life of people with insulin-dependent diabetes.

Can you talk about the larger universe of diabetes research?  Will there ever be a cure for diabetes? (more…)

We recently announced that the City of Boston has posted a Challenge seeking the development of a computer algorithm that can accurately identify the location and severity of potholes in city streets.  We asked Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to talk to us about this Challenge.

Hello Mayor Menino.  Thanks very much for talking to us today about your Challenge.  Potholes are a routine problem for cities, especially in areas where harsh winter weather and snow plows take their toll.  How do you expect this Challenge will help Boston better address the pothole problem?

In 2010, the City received nearly 4,000 pothole reports from constituents and filled over 7,000 potholes, making it one of our biggest service issues.  This Challenge will enhance Street Bump, which is our app for smart phones that helps to detect when a car hits a pothole.  The better this app is able to detect potholes, the sooner our Public Works crews will be able to fill them. No one likes hitting a pothole.  But with Street Bump, if you hit a pothole, the City could get notified and we can hopefully respond before it can be hit again.  We maintain over 800 miles of roadway, so improvements in this process will have a big impact on the drivers, cyclists and pedestrians using the streets throughout our City.

What led you to post this Challenge on the InnoCentive web site?

I am a strong believer that the best results come from engaging the public.  InnoCentive allows us to do just that.  Through the InnoCentive platform, Boston will have access to over 250,000 of the world’s most creative minds, providing them with the opportunity to address one of Boston residents’ biggest issues.  The fundamental premise of Street Bump relies on citizens to help the City collect data on road conditions, so it’s also a natural for us to turn to the global community of Solvers to help find the best algorithm to analyze that data.

While you are tapping InnoCentive’s worldwide community of Solvers, you’ve also established a special prize for residents of Boston or students at Boston’s universities.  What was the thinking behind that?

Boston is fortunate to be home to some of the brightest minds and most engaged residents in the world.  My team wants to encourage our students and residents to tackle this Challenge, volunteering their time and talents in an original way to make Boston even better.  We hope the dedicated prize helps achieve just that.

We see that this is a project of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics.  Can you tell us more about that?

The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is my research & development team.  They explore non-traditional approaches to addressing key urban issues, from neighborhood quality of life to education to economic development.  Many of their projects, such as Street Bump and the Street Bump Challenge, focus on leveraging new technology to involve constituents in the design and delivery of new services.

Once the City has selected the winning submission, what are your plans and expectations regarding implementation of the solution?

Potholes are a universal issue, and I want Street Bump to be a tool that any city or town can use to combat this problem.  For that reason, once we have selected the winning submission, we will launch an enhanced version of the Street Bump app and make it available for any City to use.

Fantastic.  Thanks again and good luck with your Challenge.

Thank You.

The World Resources Institute, or WRI, is a global think tank that works with organizations to help solve urgent environmental challenges.  WRI recently posted an InnoCentive Challenge, aimed at helping local communities across the globe adapt to changing climate conditions over the next years and decades.  We asked Eliot Metzger, who manages WRI’s research on the Next Practice Collaborative, to tell us a bit more about the Challenge.

Hi Eliot.  Thanks for being with us today.  To start, can you tell us a bit more about World Resources Institute and in particular the Next Practice Collaborative and its role in advancing your mission?

Sure. As you mentioned, WRI is a global environmental think tank that goes beyond research to put ideas into action. We work with governments, companies, and civil society to build solutions to urgent environmental challenges. WRI’s transformative ideas protect the earth and promote development because sustainability is essential to meeting human needs and fulfilling human aspirations in the future.

The Next Practice Collaborative is a project we’ve been developing at WRI to help accelerate innovation and the economic transformations needed to tackle the environmental challenges we face. The next practice concept is something that WRI’s late board member CK Prahalad championed as a way of thinking about the mega-trends that will affect all of us—like climate change impacts, or population growth—and the business opportunities in moving well beyond what we see as ‘best practice’ today. One of those big opportunities and a priority for our work on next practices is advancing solutions that help economies and communities adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Can you tell us why you chose to look to InnoCentive’s global Solver network to find a solution to this Challenge?

Actually, the network was interesting to us for a few reasons. First and foremost, we were intrigued by the potential for finding fresh, creative solutions using an open innovation approach. Innovation is one of WRI’s core values and this was a chance for us to try a new innovation platform to develop climate change solutions. There is a limited universe of people thinking about climate change adaptation and we thought it would be great to expand that universe to include Solvers in several different countries, with different perspectives and areas of expertise.

And with our interest in creating a communication platform to share climate change impacts, needs, and solutions, we wanted to access a community of people with a wide range of knowledge and experience. Especially since this is a Challenge that really doesn’t fall into just one or two disciplines. We expect there are lots of great ideas out there among people who have expertise relating to information and communications technologies, or who have experience working with databases, or engaging communities. This is a great opportunity to connect with those people to try to solve some really important and complex problems.

There is sometimes debate about how serious climate change is, and how much of an impact it will have. Would you care to share your views on this? (more…)

We recently posted a Challenge with Scientists Without Borders, to help them reduce infant mortality by fortifying staple foods with Folic acid. We asked Shaifali Puri, Executive Director for Scientists Without Borders, to talk to us a bit about this Challenge.

Hi Shaifali – thanks for talking to our Solvers today.  You currently have several Challenges posted on The Scientists without Borders platform. What made you choose to work with InnoCentive for this particular Challenge?

While we have a wonderful global network of users and strategic partners, we were very excited to partner with InnoCentive to also reach its network of creative problem-solvers from around the world and, in keeping with the spirit of open innovation, to go beyond our own universe of “experts.” In my conversations with the InnoCentive leadership and team, it was very clear that we shared a similar outlook about the power of Challenges and a wide open network of diverse and unusual Solvers to tackle some of our thorniest global development challenges.

PepsiCo is sponsoring the prize. Can you tell us how this collaboration came about and what PepsiCo’s goals are in respect to finding this solution?

PepsiCo is a general supporter of Scientists Without Borders and they were very excited about our vision of leveraging our web-based platform, user base, and strategic public/private partner network to bring new and innovative approaches to tackling urgent global development challenges. They agree with our view that if we are to really try to move from evolutionary to revolutionary progress in these areas, we have to bring in new perspectives, new Solvers, new methods. Once Scientists Without Borders narrowed the focus of this Challenge to the nutrition space, it was clear that they would be a natural fit.

In my conversations with the Global Health team at PepsiCo, it was clear that they shared Scientists Without Borders goal of addressing a Challenge for which a practicable, feasible and scalable solution could be deployed across a wide range of geographies. I was also very gratified that they were entirely on board with Scientists Without Borders mission and goal of ensuring that the Challenge would be framed in an independent, neutral, and credible fashion – meaning Scientists Without Borders convened an independent panel of three of the world’s leading nutrition scientists and vested them with the authority to identify and frame the Challenge. Similarly, PepsiCo was entirely in agreement with Scientists Without Borders commitment to ensuring to the best of its ability that any Solution that surfaces is in line with its public good mission, and that it is developed and advanced in the manner best suited to ensuring that those who need it will be able to access it as readily as possible.

You mention that combating under-nutrition is crucial to achieving all of the Millennium Development Goal targets. Can you explain what the Millennium Development Goal is? (more…)

VIDEO: Dr. Aubrey DeGrey at TEDMed 2009

We recently posted a Challenge in conjunction with the SENS Foundation, an organization that was founded to develop, promote and ensure widespread access to regenerative medicine solutions to the disabilities and diseases of aging.  This Challenge is seeking innovative ideas to help reverse age related illnesses, specifically in conjunction with the buildup of glucosepane. A solution to this Challenge could allow humans to live longer, healthier lives. We asked Dr. Aubrey DeGrey, Chief Science Officer for the SENS Foundation, to talk to us a bit about this Challenge and the impact that a solution would have on human lives.

Your Challenge is seeking a method for breaking down glucosepane, which is a major cause of age-related illness.  Can you tell us why this has been such a difficult problem to solve?

Glucosepane is a spontaneously-formed chemical modification that affects proteins.  Some proteins in the body, especially those that make up the “extracellular matrix” (the network that holds our cells in place), are created early in life and stay in place for decades, so they accumulate a lot of glucosepane. This affects the flexibility and elasticity of the matrix, which can cause problems like hypertension.  But glucosepane is chemically rather stable, so it has been hard to identify any drug that can break or remove it.  Maybe we need to be more creative.

How quickly do you think a solution could be put into practice and actually have an impact on human lives?

That depends very much on the nature of the solution, because (for example) a drug that has already been approved for other uses can be approved for a new use much more quickly than a new drug can.  But in some scenarios I think we could be talking about only a few years.

One of the consequences of a successful response to this Challenge, and of the SENS Foundation’s work on rejuvenation biotechnologies in general, is the maintenance of human health throughout life.  If the Glucosepane Challenge is solved, how would it contribute to keeping us healthy as we go through life? (more…)