www.Innocentive.com诞生于2001年，是全球首家商业威客网，它原本是一家电子商务公司，2003年转型为将创意者集结为SNS的平台，致力于为大公司提供技术攻关和破解科学难题，以满足企业对“创新”的渴求，正像他们的CE0戴伦·卡洛尔所说：“我们正努力实现科学的民主化。”杜邦、波音、宝洁等大型跨国公司都曾在这个网站上发布悬赏任务，中标者则能得到从一万美元到十万美元不等的奖励。由于这家网站致力于为大公司提供技术攻关或破解科学难题，所以，其“解决者(Solver)”的身份大多是研究者甚至是科学家。Innocentive这种高端定位削弱了该网站的人气，也限制了其影响范围。
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About Innocentive
Welcome to Perspectives on Innovation, an InnoCentive Blog
The purpose of this blog is to give you, our Solvers, a forum to interact with our team. This blog allows us to hear from you and grow our community. Our goal is to give you the opportunity to learn more about InnoCentive and to connect with us. We have lined up four bloggers from the InnoCentive team, each representing different areas of expertise within our company to provide you with information on the company and the open innovation marketplace at large. We look forward to receiving your comments and see this as a forum for our executives to interact with you, our Solver community. We welcome your comments, ideas and questions and look forward to receiving your posts.
Comment Disclaimer
We welcome your comments! This blog accepts all comments and will never modify them, but we have the right to remove comments we deem inappropriate at our discretion. As with most blogs, we will not publish posts that include profanity, racial and ethnic slurs, and rude behavior like disparaging personal remarks.
The opinions expressed by commenters are theirs alone, and do not reflect the opinions of Innocentive or any employee thereof. Innocentive is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by those commenting.
As Solvers you are tied to a confidentiality agreement and cannot disclose anything that is not already public related to the Challenges you are working on or have worked on. Any comments that break that confidentiality agreement will be removed.
【来源innocentive官网】
The Next Wave of Open Innovation
How InnoCentive aims to exploit sophisticated technology and networking capabilities to connect problems with their potential solvers
Open innovation has become an important management trend over the past decade. Yet, despite great initial success, some of the most prominent examples of open innovation have had serious limitations. We are now on the brink of a major evolution of open innovation.
Henry Chesbrough, a professor at the
InnoCentive was the brainchild of two Lilly executives, Alpheus Bingham and Aaron Schacht, who were seeking to exploit the power of the Internet in discovering solutions to challenging research problems. InnoCentive, which now has 32 employees, became the first global Internet-based platform designed to help connect Seekers, those who had difficult research problems, with Solvers, those who came up with creative solutions to these problems.
Matching Questions to Answers
There were many keys to the early success of InnoCentive. First, it carefully defined a governance structure designed to protect intellectual property from both the Seeker and the Solver perspective. Second, it reduced barriers to participation so that it could scale quickly. Third, it reached out to a very diverse group of Solvers, increasing the likelihood of solutions coming from very unexpected directions.
At the outset, InnoCentive was designed to connect individual Solvers with Seekers in short-term, standalone transactions. Seekers would post a high-level problem statement. Individual Solvers would volunteer to explore the problem and they would be provided additional information under a non-disclosure agreement to help them search for a solution. Solvers would then submit a proposed solution to be evaluated by the Seeker. If the Seeker was satisfied that the solution worked, a pre-specified monetary award ranging from $5,000 to $1 million would be awarded to the Solver, and the intellectual property associated with the solution would be transferred exclusively to the Seeker.
Since 2001, more than 170,000 participants from over 175 different countries have registered as Solvers. More than 800 problems have been posted, and almost 400 solutions have been found. This represents almost a 50% success rate on problems that had stumped internal research and development staffs. Almost $20 million in awards have been posted, while almost $4 million in awards have been paid out to successful Solvers. Given this success rate, InnoCentive has attracted a large and diverse set of organizations as Seekers, including Eli Lilly, Procter & Gamble (PG), Avery Dennison (AVY), Janssen, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Assuring the Reward
InnoCentive basically acts as a facilitator, providing a platform that helps Seekers and Solvers to connect and defining a set of protocols for how the relationships will be built. It remains entirely at the discretion of the Seekers whether they select a solution, or what criteria they might use in making that decision. At the same time, InnoCentive does protect Solvers against the possibility that a Seeker might use a proposed solution without offering the stated reward to the Solver. Intellectual property protection is clearly defined for both Seeker and Solver from the outset.
InnoCentive itself, meanwhile, neither generates nor vouches for solutions. The firm is paid by Seekers, who pay a posting fee of $35,000 per Challenge (though they can purchase bundles of Challenges for a lower fee). Seekers can also purchase a set of training and technology services called Open innovation Rapid Adoption Methods & Practices (ONRAMP) to help them adopt innovation more quickly within their organization. There is no cost to be a Solver.
Karim Lakhani, a professor at
For instance, the Ocean Spill Recovery Institute posted a problem in 2007 regarding the challenge of separating frozen oil from water on oil recovery barges. The successful Solver of this problem was a nanotechnology expert with no background in the oil industry. He used a tool from the cement industry that was originally designed to vibrate the cement to keep it in liquid form during massive cement pours.
Shared Work Spaces
InnoCentive developed another insight about problem-solving when it sought to identify key figures within its network. It discovered that its most productive Solver, a researcher based in
This led InnoCentive's management team to launch a major new initiative last year to develop the capability to support and encourage the formation of teams to solve problems posted on InnoCentive. By the end of April, InnoCentive will launch these new enhancements to its platform to create shared work spaces for teams and to create governance structures that can effectively manage their intellectual property issues. Later this year, InnoCentive plans to create mechanisms for individual Solvers to more effectively find each other to dynamically form teams to address specific problems. Yet later, a third phase will offer recommendations of potential team members with diverse experiences and skills.
What can executives learn from InnoCentive's efforts to harness innovation?
• Diversity enhances problem-solving
Research on problem-solving success rates clearly indicates that diversity increases the probability of coming up with a solution to challenging research problems. A surprisingly large portion of the solutions come from Solvers in very different disciplines.
• Scale matters
Serendipity is most likely to occur when a large number of diverse participants are aggregated in ways that expose them to a broad range of challenging problems.
• Governance is critical
Contrary to the popular view that open innovation is self-organizing and emergent, problem-solving platforms like InnoCentive's are carefully structured to protect intellectual property and specify decision rights and reward distribution in advance.
• Teams amplify the power of individuals
Even on a platform initially designed to support individual problem-solvers, teams began to form to increase the probability of success in challenging big problems.
• Relationships trump transactions in successfully tackling a broader range of problems
As InnoCentive has begun to specify more explicitly the four levels of problem-solving, it realized that short-term transactions are effective in addressing only a limited set of well-defined problems. The broader and more diffuse a problem becomes, the more important it is to foster longer-term relationships among aspiring problem-solvers.
• Learn from others in building open innovation platforms
Even though InnoCentive is a pioneer in deploying an open innovation platform, it is carefully studying efforts by other groups to support collaboration and learning from their efforts. Recent initiatives at InnoCentive have been inspired by social networking platforms, shared workspace providers, online discussion forum sponsors and even online gaming.
• Open innovation has value within companies
While the practices and platforms designed to support open innovation initially were focused on reaching beyond the enterprise, these same practices and platforms have application within the enterprise as well. The company has developed a specific offering known as InnoCentive@Work that allows companies to post challenging research problems solely to its own employees. Again, it is difficult to specify in advance which individuals, teams or even disciplines are likely to generate successful solutions, so executives are finding that solutions often arise from unanticipated parts of the firm.
The Smart Money is on 6 Billion People solving the Problems that Matter
For me, “Open” Innovation embodies the notion that here in the new economy, marketplaces are emerging for ideas that will fundamentally challenge the conventional thinking in areas that include ideation, research, product development, collaboration, and even intellectual property.
In this brave new world, we don’t seek to limit the number of minds focused on a problem to a select few, instead we enlist thousands or millions with a passion to make a difference. Diversity of thought and access to vast networks of qualified minds becomes the valuable currency replacing the closed monolithic approaches that literally define our organizations today. This “Open Innovation” reaches outside of the four walls and literally attracts, like a powerful magnet, everyone eager to participate in advancing the cause - solving the problem.
This approach will power rapid change in every segment of the economy:
Businesses will improve product development life cycles, production methods, and even evolve their own business models
Academia, Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Foundations will harness a tremendous diversity of thinking and focus it toward problems of global impact; and
Governments will enlist thousands or millions of citizens in everything from disaster relief to reinventing government.
Imagine FEMA seeking immediately implementable solutions for housing after Hurricane Katrina; or Los Angeles seeking new approaches to reducing traffic congestion; or a corporation undertaking to design and deliver to market better products designed by scientists, entrepreneurs, and even their existing customers - none of whom may work for them. In this new world, Open Innovation Marketplaces will literally be the clearing houses for connecting myriads of needs to literally millions of creative, inventive, and “uniquely prepared” minds and organizations from all over the world.
At InnoCentive, we are committed to being at the forefront of this change. With a firmly held belief that incentives hold the key to harnessing and focusing the vast collective talent pools available worldwide, we will drive innovation everywhere there is the potential to make a difference. Hence the name: Innovation + Incentive = InnoCentive.
In the last eight years, we have continually tuned our model and produced extraordinary results. Today we service both “bounded” problems (very specific problems with precise solution criteria) and “unbounded” problems (open problems seeking new innovative ideas and approaches). Our “Solver” network is 170,000+ strong and growing by thousands per month. This talented network has delivered solutions to complex problems in science, technology, business, and philanthropy.
While focused initially on Challenges in life sciences, chemistry, and applied materials, we now routinely run Challenges in areas like business, engineering, mathematics, computer science, and even food science. Imagine thousands of engineers with a diversity of specialties all weighing in on improving battery life in laptops or improving Wi-Fi antenna design! Through our Pavilions, we focus on areas of global importance like clean technology, renewable energy, global health, and public policy. In partnership with Rockefeller Foundation, we have run a multitude of challenge to help people in impoverished areas of the world. Have a look at recent solutions impacting work in Malaria, TB, and energy efficiency Our solvers are brilliant … and are making a difference every day.
We at InnoCentive are committed to driving a dramatically accelerated model of innovation - with gains not possible utilizing existing methods of ideation, invention, and R&D alone. For organizations that build the capabilities to tap this vast global pool of innovation capacity, the benefits will be truly extraordinary.
Scott McNealy from Sun Microsystems once proclaimed with great zeal that the ‘network is the computer’. Wikinomics predicted a similar step change in the way we think about innovation, where the network of minds becomes infinitely more valuable that the monolithic approaches we’ve taken to date. At InnoCentive, our goal is nothing short of enabling this transformation for organizations and inventive minds all over the world.
Dwayne H. Spradlin