Insights on crowdsourcing from Innocentive: part 2 of 5
Written by Noah Flower on Friday, November 6th, 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: Is there a middle ground where you can cast out to a group that’s very much beyond your organization without the fanfare of a fully public Innocentive challenge?
Recognizing that there might be a need for this, Innocentive does have a product that they call “at work” that lets you specify a private network which could include employees, contractors, vendors, or any other group with which you have existing relationships. Companies are interested in this for a number of and one of them is definitely the desire to manage confidentiality. We’ve seen that it works. In my pre-Innocentive days at Eli Lilly, when we cast out for 1000 different perspectives across the company, we raised the diversity of perspectives we were tapping and found a lot of hidden pockets of expertise that we hadn’t necessarily recruited for.
There are three levels you can work at: the classic keep-it-small level where a person is assigned to work on it, the intermediate level where you broaden to a closed network, and the public level. Confidentiality is obviously one of the criteria for choosing between them.
It’s also worth mentioning that if all of my experiments are succeeding and the measure of where I am relative to where I need to be is really a matter of time, money and execution, I don’t see that much of an advantage in doing that externally. Then the question is whether I want to outsource: if I’m just churning the crank on the easy-to-solve problems, I might contract them out so my employees can focus on the really difficult stuff.
To be honest, if I was going to throw it open and it’s not a confidentiality issue, more is better. It never stops you from using the ideas of the larger network, whereas smaller precludes you from using the ideas of the larger group.
Stay tuned for further insights from Alph in the coming days. If you haven’t read his earlier points, catch up on part 1.)
