Perspectives on Innovation

Have you ever wanted to find another Solver to work with you on a Challenge?

Have you ever wanted to connect with other Solvers in your area?

Ever wanted to publicize your skills and accomplishments on InnoCentive so other Solvers could find you?

Today we’re excited to announce several enhancements to the Solver experience on InnoCentive.com which will help you do all of those things.

In this post, I’ll introduce these new features – Solver Search, private messaging, improved profiles, badges, and social login – give tips to take advantage of them, discuss the impact on your privacy, and take a peek at future enhancements.

Your public profile settings will not be changed as a result of these new features. If you previously made select information available on your Public Profile page, that information is still public; if you had not enabled your public profile, no profile information is visible as a result of the new features. Your privacy is very important to us, so by default your profile is NOT included in Solver Search. You must opt in on your profile (by checking the appropriate boxes) to appear in Solver Search and to accept messages from other Solvers.

Solver Search

Until now, the InnoCentive Solver community was largely a hub-and-spoke network – everyone participating on the same Challenges, but often difficult to interact and collaborate. With Solver Search, you’ll be able to make those connections.

By visiting your profile and opting in to be listed in Solver Search, other Solvers can find and view your profile. You can then use the filters to narrow down the results by keyword, expertise or interests, participation in past Challenges (e.g. only display Challenge winners), country of residence, and more. Here’s what it looks like:

Suppose that you’re working on a Challenge and realize that you need a teammate with expertise in materials science – simply visit the Solver Search and check the “materials science” filter under “physical sciences” (you can expand the expertise filters by clicking on the arrow next to the check box) to find potential teammates. You can read their profiles to find a good fit and then send a message.

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As we turn the page on 2011 and turn our eyes to 2012, I wanted to reflect on some of the remarkable things we accomplished together this past year.

In 2011, we added many thousands of people to our Global Solver Community.  We distributed more than $2m in Challenge awards.  And we welcomed Popular Science and EDF as strategic partners, resulting in a wealth of new Challenges for Solvers to tackle and an expanded pool of diverse minds for our Seekers to tap into.  We elevated Novel Molecule Compound (NMC) Challenges, providing higher award amounts and introducing fingerprinting technology, which resulted in greater uptake in Solver engagement and renewed confidence from our Seekers, ultimately leading to a doubling of NMC Challenges posted and solved as compared to 2010.

But we did something much more important. We accomplished the goal we set for ourselves when we embarked on this journey together – and I don’t say this lightly – we changed the world.  Together we brought solutions to light that would never have been uncovered any other way.  Below are a few of the Challenges that were awarded in 2011 that I’m particularly proud of.

Prize4Life – this was our “walk on the moon” Challenge.  The big, audacious goal that we weren’t sure was even achievable, but was so important that it carried a $1m award.  First launched in 2006, the Prize4Life Challenge sought a biomarker for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease – a rare disease with such a rapid rate of advancement that there was literally no way to measure its progression.   In 2011, Solver Seward Rutkove was awarded the full $1m for his biomarker, which used a method called electrical impedance myography (EIM)  to measure the flow of a small electrical current through muscle tissue.  This biomarker has the potential to reduce the cost of Phase II clinical trials by more than 50%, and by correlating closely with disease progression, to remove one of the primary obstacles to industry investment in potential ALS therapies.

EDF Nitrate Capture System – PhD candidate Patrick Fuller submitted an innovative solution for the capture of toxic nitrates – and won the award on his first Challenge.  This solution could mitigate the 50-80% of fertilizer applied to commercial crops in the U.S. that is not absorbed by plants and is instead lost to water and air, causing dangerous environmental and health impacts in a growing number of watersheds around the country.

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Games for Health – anyone who has cared for a chronically sick child knows the challenges that adolescence brings.  The increasing need for independence and social interaction makes following a prescribed health regimen difficult.  Cincinnati Children’s Hospital came up with a unique approach to inspire teenagers and pre-teens to take care of themselves – a video game.  The solution to this Challenge has the potential to dramatically improve health care outcomes for sick kids.  We’ll have more news on this solution in the coming weeks.

Humanitarian Air Drop – The Challenges posted by the Air Force Research Labs have truly captured the attention of our Solvers and of the media.  Of the seven posted so far, the humanitarian air drop Challenge hits closest to home for me.  The notion that distribution of aid to the most vulnerable communities, often in the middle of a war zone, could actually cause harm to people needing that aid, is difficult to accept.  Two Solvers, one from Indonesia and one from Peru, solved the Challenge, one of them referencing a well-known mechanism for moving coal from a mine shaft.  This is a perfect example of diversity and the uniquely prepared mind at work, as my colleague and InnoCentive Co-Founder Alph Bingham might say.

These Challenges represent just a few of the highlights of 2011.  The year 2012 is positioned to be even more impactful – we’ll be awarding new delivery options for the polio vaccine, better sanitation for billions of people in developing countries, and viable disposal options for environmentally toxic electronics.  Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be posting new Challenges that promise to be just as interesting, fulfilling, and earth shattering as those we saw in 2011.

Thank you for your continued participation in the InnoCentive Solver Community.

Warmest regards,
Dwayne

I recently read a blog post on the Harvard Business Review that falls into InnoCentive’s “sweet spot” of out-of-the-box-thinking and diversity.

The article, Want Innovative Thinking? Hire from the Humanities by Tony Golsby-Smith, is about the importance of diversity in the workplace – the diversity of thought, knowledge and academic background. Many of our Solvers have solved InnoCentive Challenges that are outside their sphere of expertise, but because of their cerebral dexterity, coupled with imagination, experience, knowledge and adaptability, have allowed them to solve Challenges that the domain’s owner had not envisioned. Case in point: Solver Bruce Cragin is a semiretired radio frequency engineer who won the NASA Challenge “Data-Driven Forecasting of Solar Events.” The Challenged was looking for a suitable method to more reliably predict the particle storms originating with solar events. Though Cragin had various degrees & experiences in physics, engineering and as a radio frequency engineer, he’d never worked in the area of solar physics. His experience with image analysis skills, interest in “small comet hypothesis” and curiosity about the theory of magnetic reconnection” enabled him to connect the dots.

Golsby-Smith does not address related disciplines in his article, but he goes one step further and recommends hiring graduates that are not only in science, business or economics, but in the humanities. He argues that these graduates are taught how to navigate look up and out to question and discover the “unknowns”. Graduates of philosophy, drama, literature, ethics, history, etc are, by the very nature of their subject matter, taught to “play with big concepts” – to observe people and situations, to be curious, to consider “why”, what were they thinking”, “what if”, etc.  This is the kind of thinking that needs to be included in a world full of analytics, reasoning, and dissection, when faced with “a murky future”.

It is an interesting article and has elicited quite a lot of comments. Check it out here.

Anjai Lal and Sahsa Vyash are the the winners of the third Economist-InnoCentive Challenge, The Economist-InnoCentive Entrepreneurship Challenge. They presented their winning plan at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Innovation Event on March 23-24 in Berkeley, CA. This blog post is by Anjai.

I am currently a second year MBA student at the Yale School of Management. I graduated from Indian Institute of Technology in 2006 with a major in Electrical Engineering. Thereafter, I worked with British Telecom as a consultant where I was primarily involved in strategy and planning. At BT, I held a cross functional profile that spanned around Crisis Management, Strategy, Technology, Finance and Project and Vendor Management. I am passionate about the telecom/technology sector and am extremely interested in the emerging markets. I will graduate from Yale School of Management in May, 2011.

At Yale, my interests lie in Strategy, Finance and Technology. I spent the last summer with Zephyr Management, a Private Equity fund in NYC. I also interned with IBM in Business Performance Services. I head the South Asian Business Forum at the School of Management and am also a member of the organizing team of Asia Tomorrow- Yale’s premier student run conference. (more…)

There is a very interesting exhibition that recently took place in Geneva, Switzerland, that I believe would be of high interest to our Solvers. The 39th International Exhibition of Inventions, New Techniques and Products (aka “the world’s largest marketplace for inventions”), devoted to inventions – devices and products that range from useful to the bizarre – just took place from April 6-10th.

Inventors & innovators from around the world gathered in Geneva every year to highlight their “brainchild” products in the hopes of attracting buyers or investors. These inventors were either groups representing companies and universities, some were independent researchers and some were individuals, like our Solver “tinkerers,” who simply had good ideas that they took the time and effort to translate into prototypes and products. (more…)