Insights on crowdsourcing from Innocentive: part 3 of 5
Written by Noah Flower on Monday, November 9th, 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: Some social-sector problems are settled but require expertise, which are typically addressed by service delivery, while others require experimentation because we have yet to discover a solution. When would you go open versus closed on each type?
Let me use the AIDS issue as a way of stating where I think you may want to go open and where you may want to stay closed. Say there’s a newly created foundation that’s focused on AIDS in Kenya. Posting a challenge that says, “Well, what about AIDS should we address?” isn’t terribly useful. You’d tend to get a lot of chaff coming in. First I’d let the internal program director stumble around to figure out what the organization’s mission is and where they’re going to cut in. Having concluded that they think education of women in Kenya is going to be a fruitful area, now there’s potential to open it up. Maybe we need to explore more ideas than we’ve thought of for reaching Kenyan women and addressing barriers to their education. With the answers to that you could return to the organization to do some design work, and let’s say that after that you end up with a question of how to distribute educational materials. Then you could open it up again to the crowd.
I would cast it open each time I had a concrete question to ask. That’s what separates successful users of open systems from the unsuccessful ones: a well-articulated challenge. The challenge needs to allow people to see where the skills they have can be applied to the problem. That doesn’t mean aiming it squarely at a certain skillset, because then you’re back to digging in the pit of closed innovation but on a massive scale. There’s an art to challenge-writing that I didn’t appreciate when we launched the company.
An historical example is Archimedes. We remember Archimedes for his stroke of insight, but we forget that Hero posed a clearly articulated problem and it was that problem that helped coalesce the geometry and the math. It was Hero’s posing of the challenge in its general form, not to Archimedes as a geometer or as a person who took baths, that made everything come together. The first time Hero posed the challenge, Archimedes sent him away saying there was no solution; it was not until he took the bath that he realized there was a solution. Even in ignorance, Hero articulated a clearly-bounded, well-framed problem.
The goal is not to use the crowd for an answer you know they are specifically trained to provide but rather to focus the question in a way that they can bring to bear a mix of skills, some of which you can predict and others of which you can’t.
Stay tuned for further insights from Alph in the coming days. If you haven’t read his earlier points, catch up on part 1 and part 2.)
