HAVE A PROBLEM, ASK EVERYONE

HAVE A PROBLEM, ASK EVERYONE

Posted online: Sunday, July 27, 2008 at 1304 hrs Print Email

John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Illinois, knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t 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 organisations (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 “finder’s fee” equal to about 40 per cent 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 “a huge shift in popular culture, from consuming to participating”. It is sometimes called open-source science, taking the name from open-source software in which the source code 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 and inventing artificial meat. 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 unravelling one of the knottiest problems of biology—how proteins fold.

Offering prizes for scientific achievements is hardly new. “It has been around for centuries,” said Karim R. Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied InnoCentive. One 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, Lakhani said “most R&D endeavours still work on the premise ‘we can accumulate and make sense of all the knowledge that is relevant’. A model like InnoCentive shows other approaches can help.”

Dwayne Spradlin, president and chief executive of InnoCentive, said that the company had solved 250 challenges, for prizes typically in the $10,000-$25,000 range. The achievements include a compound for skin tanning, a method of preventing snack chip breakage and a mini-extruder in brick-making. “Odds are one or more products in your home has been innovated in our network,” Spradlin said. “Procter & Gamble has products innovated on the network.”

InnoCentive began in 2000 as e.Lilly, an in-house innovation “incubator” at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, Spradlin said, with the company posting problems that its employees had been unable to solve. “Most 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.”

The company says solvers come from 175 countries. More than a third have doctorates, Spradlin said, and while motivated by money, they also have a desire to solve “problems that matter”. The company has offices in Waltham, Massachusetts. Specificity is crucial to its operation. “If you say, ‘find me a cure for cancer’, it may not work,” Lakhani said. But if problems can be “decomposed” into modular questions, like “find me a biomarker for this condition, these questions may be more tractable”.

The idea that solutions can come from anywhere, and from people with seemingly unrelated work, is another key. Lakhani said “the further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it”, often by applying specialised knowledge or instruments developed for another purpose.

The oil-flow problem was solved by an outsider, said Scott Pegau, its research programme manager. If it could easily have been solved “by people within the industry, it would have been,” he said. Instead, Davis approached it with knowledge he picked up at a friend’s concrete business.
-CORNELIA DEAN (New York Times)