Science Cheerleader

Innocentive built the first global Web community for open innovation where organizations or “Seekers” submit complex problems or “Challenges” for resolution to a “Solver” community of more than 200,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, business professionals, and research organizations in more than 200 countries. Prizes for winning solutions are financial awards up to $1,000,000 although most hover around the $10K-$25K range. Not too bad for a couple of day’s worth of creative thinking. Solver David Bradin (a chemist-turned-attorney) explains his flash of insight moment when he scrolled through Innocentive’s list of challenges and came up with a solution almost out of the blue. “It took me more time to register as a Solver than it took to win the Challenge,” he quips.

Last week, Innocentive’s CEO, Dwayne Spradlin announced a partnership with The Economist:

“We are trying to tackle the most complex and dire issues facing humanity- how do you provide access to clean water in developing countries? How do you feed everyone in areas with burgeoning populations? In our partnership with The Economist, these are the types of questions we will be asking. By tapping into the world’s brightest minds for access to fresh and bold thinking we can empower real invention and meaningful growth.”

Spradlin is a real evangelist for crowd-sourcing and collaboration. I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with him about participatory technology assessment and citizen science (public involvement in science research and science policy discussions). He described Science Cheerleader and its sister site, ScienceForCitizens.net, as “close cousins” of Innocentive. I agree! These sites demonstrate an authentic belief in the benefits of public participation–from restoring trust, to creating a better informed citizenry, to assessing risks–all while advancing innovation.

Sometimes the best ideas come from the fringes.

Harvard University did a study on Innocentive’s solvers and found that, on average, people who solved the posted challenges were six areas away from the discipline most closely associated with the challenge. For example, a few years ago an oil company posted a speculative challenge for an application likely to be needed in the Artic: the capability to empty tanks in freezing conditions. Not an easy task. When oil gets cold and starts to coagulate, siphoning it is akin to sipping the last bits of a Slurpee (you know how the icy bits move to the side, making it tricky to sip up anything good?).

Who came up with the winning solution? An industry outsider.  How? “It really had nothing to do with my training or education,” he explained in an interview with me last year. “It was the result of a chance encounter with a cement mixer.” (more…)

From the NASA press release:
Now anyone with a Web browser can become a Martian explorer. That’s because NASA is launching a new citizen-science Web site, called “Be a Martian,” that gives people a chance to view hundreds of thousands of images gathered over decades of exploration on the Red Planet.
The site is also designed as a game with a twofold purpose: NASA and Microsoft hope it will spur interest in science and technology among students in the U.S. and around the world. It also is a “crowdsourcing” tool designed to tap visitors’ brains and help the space agency process volumes of Mars images.
“We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, director of Mars Public Outreach at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for NASA. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important.”

“So NASA and Microsoft are combining crowd-sourcing, cloud-computing, and citizen-science, all toward aligning with a web philosophy that Tim O’Reilly calls ’small pieces loosely joined,’ ” says Microsoft’s CTO of Advanced Government Technologies, Lewis Shepherd. (more…)

Love this! Coming soon, another promising citizen science application for your smart phone. The Extraordinaries — On-demand crowdsourced volunteerism via smartphones. 20 minute volunteer activities you can do from your cell phone.
(from The Extraordinaires website):

“We created mobile smartphone software designed to facilitate crowdsourcing (a large task, broken into little pieces, and worked on by many people). Typically, these tasks are small, requiring only a few minutes to complete.

Many successful businesses use crowdsourcing. In only two years, iStockPhoto dominated the stock photo industry by crowdsourcing its photographs. InnoCentive has solved tough scientific problems by crowdsourcing solutions from amateur scientists. Wikipedia uses crowdsourcing to generate millions of articles from writers all over the world.

We bring the concept of crowdsourcing to volunteering and community engagement, and we’ve created a mechanism for organizations to take advantage of previously inaccessible volunteer labor.”

Science Cheerleader featured in Sunday, September 14, 2008 Philadelphia Inquirer article.

Just thought I’d share this recent Philadelphia Inquirer article with you. It’s on the concept of Crowdsourcing and you’ll see the Science Cheerleader in there in referenced to how citizen scientists can advance science through Crowdsourcing.