[Ip-health] New York Times: If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

<SNIP>

The chemist and the institute came together through InnoCentive, a
company that links organizations (seekers) with problems (challenges)
to people all over the world (solvers) who win cash prizes for
resolving them. The company gets a posting fee and, if the problem is
solved, a =93finders fee=94 equal to about 40 percent of the prize.

The process, according to John Seely Brown, a theorist of information
technology and former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,
reflects =93a huge shift in popular culture, from consuming to
participating=94 enabled by the interactivity so characteristic of the
Internet. It is sometimes called open-source science, taking the name
from open-source software in which the source code, or original
programming, is made public to encourage others to work on improving it.

<SNIP>

Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee for
president, has proposed that the government offer $300 million to
whoever invents a battery compact enough, powerful enough and cheap
enough to replace fossil fuels.

Offering prizes for scientific achievements is hardly new. =93It has
been around for centuries,=94 said Karim R. Lakhani, a professor at
Harvard Business School who has studied InnoCentive. One early example
was the work of John Harrison, the 18th-century clockmaker who, in
response to a prize offered by the British Parliament, solved the
problem of determining longitude at sea by inventing a clock that
would keep good time even in heavy weather.

But, Dr. Lakhani said, =93most laboratories, most R & D endeavors still
work on the premise =91we can accumulate and make sense of all the
knowledge that is relevant.=92 The open-source models and a model like
InnoCentive show that other approaches can help.=94

<SNIP>

InnoCentive began in 2000 as e.Lilly, an in-house innovation
=93incubator=94 at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, Mr. Spradlin said,
with the company posting problems that its employees had been unable
to solve. From the beginning the results were good, he said. =93Most of
our companies tell us they have a one-third or better solve rate on
their problems and that is more cost-effective than anything they
could have done internally.=94

--------


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/22inno.html
July 22, 2008
If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone
By CORNELIA DEAN

John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Ill., knows about concrete. For
example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won=92t set up
before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid.

Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem
thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep
concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks
from freezing. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute of Cordova, Alaska,
paid him $20,000 for his idea.

The chemist and the institute came together through InnoCentive, a
company that links organizations (seekers) with problems (challenges)
to people all over the world (solvers) who win cash prizes for
resolving them. The company gets a posting fee and, if the problem is
solved, a =93finders fee=94 equal to about 40 percent of the prize.

The process, according to John Seely Brown, a theorist of information
technology and former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,
reflects =93a huge shift in popular culture, from consuming to
participating=94 enabled by the interactivity so characteristic of the
Internet. It is sometimes called open-source science, taking the name
from open-source software in which the source code, or original
programming, is made public to encourage others to work on improving it.

The approach is catching on. Today, would-be innovators can sign up
online to compete for prizes for feats as diverse as landing on the
Moon (space.xprize.org/lunar-lander-challenge) and inventing
artificial meat (www.peta.org/feat_in_vitro_contest.asp).

This year, researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the
University of Washington began recruiting computer gamers to an online
competition, named Foldit, aimed at unraveling one of the knottiest
problems of biology =97 how proteins fold (http://fold.it).

And in a report last year, a panel appointed by the National Research
Council recommended that the National Science Foundation, the major
government financing agency for physical science research, offer
prizes of $200,000 to $2 million =93in diverse areas=94 as a first step in
a major program =93to encourage more complex innovations=94 addressing
economic, social and other challenges. (The report is available at http://w=
ww.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=3D11816)
.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee for
president, has proposed that the government offer $300 million to
whoever invents a battery compact enough, powerful enough and cheap
enough to replace fossil fuels.

Offering prizes for scientific achievements is hardly new. =93It has
been around for centuries,=94 said Karim R. Lakhani, a professor at
Harvard Business School who has studied InnoCentive. One early example
was the work of John Harrison, the 18th-century clockmaker who, in
response to a prize offered by the British Parliament, solved the
problem of determining longitude at sea by inventing a clock that
would keep good time even in heavy weather.

But, Dr. Lakhani said, =93most laboratories, most R & D endeavors still
work on the premise =91we can accumulate and make sense of all the
knowledge that is relevant.=92 The open-source models and a model like
InnoCentive show that other approaches can help.=94

Dwayne Spradlin, president and chief executive of InnoCentive, said in
an interview that the company had solved 250 challenges, for prizes
typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. According to the Web site (www.i=
nnocentive.com
), the achievements include a compound for skin tanning, a method of
preventing snack chip breakage and a mini-extruder in brick-making.

=93Odds are one or more products in your home has been innovated in our
network,=94 Mr. Spradlin said. =93Procter & Gamble has products that were
innovated on the InnoCentive network.=94

InnoCentive began in 2000 as e.Lilly, an in-house innovation
=93incubator=94 at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, Mr. Spradlin said,
with the company posting problems that its employees had been unable
to solve. From the beginning the results were good, he said. =93Most of
our companies tell us they have a one-third or better solve rate on
their problems and that is more cost-effective than anything they
could have done internally.=94

The company says solvers come from 175 countries. More than a third
have doctorates, Mr. Spradlin said, and while motivated by money, they
also have a desire to solve =93problems that matter.=94

The company, with offices in Waltham, Mass., has a staff of scientists
who work with seekers and solvers, reviewing challenges to make sure
they are clear and detailed, and guiding would-be solvers who may have
a solution.

That specificity is crucial to InnoCentive=92s operation, people who
have studied the company say. =93If you say, =91find me a cure for cancer=
=92
it may not work,=94 Dr. Lakhani said. But if problems can be
=93decomposed=94 into what he called modular questions, like =93find me a
biomarker for this condition, these questions may be more tractable.=94

The idea that solutions can come from anywhere, and from people with
seemingly unrelated work, is another key. Dr. Lakhani said his study
of InnoCentive found that =93the further the problem was from the
solver=92s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it,=94 often by
applying specialized knowledge or instruments developed for another
purpose.

For example, he said, the brain might be thought of as a biological
system, but =93certain brain problems may not be solvable by taking a
biological approach. You may want to cast it as an electrical
engineering approach. An electrical engineer will come in and say,
=91Oh, here=92s the answer for you.=92 They have not thought of themselves
as being neuroscientists but now they can approach the problem from
the point of view of electrical engineering.=94

The oil-flow problem was solved by an outsider, said Scott Pegau, its
research program manager. If it could easily have been solved =93by
people within the industry, it would have been,=94 he said. Instead, Mr.
Davis approached it with knowledge he picked up at a friend=92s concrete
business.

One critical element is encouraging organizations to take novel
innovation approaches in the first place. That was the task that drew
the Rockefeller Foundation to the company, said Maria Blair, an
associate vice president there.

Ms. Blair said the foundation was nearing the end of an 18-month pilot
program after which the success of the partnership would be assessed.
Anecdotal evidence so far suggests the arrangement can be useful, she
said, citing as an example a challenge to devise a reliable, durable
solar-powered light source that could function as a flashlight and as
general room illumination.

=93The solver ended up being a scientist from New Zealand,=94 she said,
and his light is now being made in China.

=93What we want to do,=94 she added, =93is connect the nonprofits to the
platform, to InnoCentive.=94

The nonprofits get a break on InnoCentive fees, Mr. Spradlin said, and
Ms. Blair said the foundation could subsidize access to innovation
platforms. But she said many nonprofit organizations had difficulty
dealing with intellectual property rights and related issues.

InnoCentive deals with these issues, in part, by requiring winning
solvers to transfer intellectual property rights to the seekers, whose
identities are secret, before they can claim an award.

Dr. Lakhani said some companies worried that by posting information
about their problems they risk giving valuable information to
competitors. Another fear, he said, is that a solver will devise a
useful solution, but refuse to turn it over for the prize or even
patent it to keep it out of the hands of the organization that
originally sought it.

=93We have not observed yet any of these kinds of games,=94 Dr. Lakhani
said.

By contrast, the Foldit contest is a volunteer effort. It began as
Rosetta@home, a project using down-time of computers throughout the
world to do the laborious calculations needed to determine the shapes
of proteins, strings of amino acid crucial to the cells of every
living thing. The way these molecules work depends on how the strings
fold, but calculating the folding is, as the Foldit researchers put
it, =93one of the pre-eminent challenges of biology.=94

In Foldit, players will compete online to design proteins, and
researchers will test designs to see if they are good candidates for
use in drugs. The researchers who worked to design it say results will
also be interesting because people=92s intuition for protein folding
does not seem necessarily to be tied to formal training or laboratory
experience.

=93Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and
eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize,=94 said Zoran
Popovic, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of
Washington.

Mr. Spradlin=92s goal for InnoCentive is at least as ambitious. By 2011,
he hopes InnoCentive participants will have answered at least 10,000
challenges.

When companies and organizations have a problem, Mr. Spradlin said, =93I
want us to be the first place they go.=94


------------------------------------------------------------


Thiru Balasubramaniam
Geneva Representative
Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)
thiru@keionline.org


Tel: +41 22 791 6727
Mobile: +41 76 508 0997