Insights on crowdsourcing from Innocentive: part 1 of 5
Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
Filed under Synthesis
Not too long ago I had the privilege to sit down with Alph Bingham, founder of Innocentive, where he pioneered the use of prizes to solicit solutions to technical challenges in the commercial world from experts anywhere in the world. Alph now shares his thoughts on innovation and business strategy at InnoBlogger.
Q: You’ve probably seen more configurations than most of today’s crowdsourcing tools. What are the most interesting ways you’ve seen people are taking advantage of them?
I see some people recognizing that crowdsourcing technologies can be used in an iterative fashion, where people cycle between casting out broader questions, using ideas from the larger community, then going back within the smaller community until you encounter a more specific question for which you need the large, diversified group.
Let me contrast that with two less effective approaches. One would be the simply internal or “staying closed” approach in which the amount of diverse thinking I have to bring to the problem is a function of my staffing, which itself is designed to weed out a certain kind of diversity. A lack of diversity of approaches is one of the shortcomings baked into a wholly internal approach.
The second is when you realize you need something external but “bolt it on” to the outside of your current internal innovation engine, in which case it’s not an integrated work system. The truth is, if you want to have an effective external innovation system, you have to reshape both your internal and external systems, appropriately designate roles and align them to the different cycles of opening wide, narrowing down, and so forth.
This is often a challenge for foundations because they tend to run leaner on their internal innovation expertise relative to the commercial world. It’s also an opportunity — they’re less likely to institutionalize themselves into a box that wasn’t the most effective box to be in. They’ve got these trained people (I’m still very much in favor of trained experts, don’t get me wrong on that) and hopefully they’ve also got an advisory board of highly intelligent experts. It might be that the advisory board would identify an area where the current approaches weren’t working as well as they could; that could be a signal to open the challenge up to a broader set of avenues that wouldn’t have otherwise been explored; and then they evaluate the different suggestions and winnow them down; then let’s say one of the selected suggestions runs into a barrier that the internal organization can’t tackle, the advisory board could then open it up again. A good example is the Prize4Life, focused on the disease ALS. They identified the specific issues to solve and then offered a prize to the scientific community for a solution.
Crowds aren’t wise just because they’re crowds. They need process and focus, and their wisdom can do much more if you’re providing some of that. Some of that process comes from the new toolbox of technologies; some of that focus comes from experts saying, “This is the reason the problem isn’t solved” and narrowing it down so the crowd has something to chew on.
What you want are discrete, clearly articulable challenges for which the responses could be a broad spectrum of ideas. If I cannot articulate what it is I need, it’s very hard to assign others to just stumble around and see what shows up, though we know that there’s sometimes a phase of that on projects. That’s something that I suspect smaller groups are better at making sense of, and there’s efficiencies to gain in keeping it in one mind. You’re getting the human intuition and whatever else it is that makes great scientists great.
One example that comes to mind comes from the wreck of the oil tanker Valdez up by Prince William Sound. In cold temperatures, oil floats so viscously that you can only move it around at a very slow pace. Recognizing this, experts said that we needed to somehow lower the viscosity of oil to allow more oil to flow per unit of time at these abysmally low temperatures. They defined the problem really well and posted it on Innocentive. It was solved by a chemist at the University of Illinois who’d worked in the construction industry during the summer. It turns out that with cement, the more viscous the better, so the concrete industry has figured out a way to keep cement moving through the injection of certain small particles. This chemist submitted his solution, they tried it in Alaska and it worked.
(Stay tuned for further insights from Mr. Bingham in the coming days.)
