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.”

“As it happens, I was earning a summer income as a construction worker a few weeks before I stumbled upon Innocentive’s website. We were mixing and pouring cement. I noticed that the cement was starting to set in the mixer and I alerted my buddy. He walked over to the mixer and touched it with a cement vibrator. The agitation recalibrated the consistency of the cement in a matter of seconds. When I read about the oil removal challenge on Innocentive, I immediately thought of ways to simply attach a cement vibrator to the oil drums.”

His winning solution netted a cool $25,000. Here he is to tell us more:

Yesterday, Innocentive featured Science Cheerleader’s sister site, ScienceForCitizens.net!

Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

The Rise of the Citizen Scientist.

We recently discovered a new web site, Science for Citizens, started by Science Cheerleader founder Darlene Cavalier and her business partner Michael Gold.  The site attracts a wide spectrum of people, who may or may not be “official scientists” but who enjoy working on scientific projects in their spare time.

We love the idea of the citizen scientist – many of these people have the same profile as our Solvers.   And we particularly like this site, because it has such a wide variety of interesting projects, from monitoring water quality in the Willamette River to building habitats for Monarch butterflies to helping build a database of dinosaur bones.  In addition, people who are enthusiastic about their projects are welcome to submit blog posts about any scientific topic that interests them.  Using the “Project Finder,” users can search projects based on time commitment involved, whether the project takes place indoors or outdoors, degree of difficulty – there are even projects that are suitable for children.  The site is still in beta, but we think it’s a great idea – in fact, we even posted one of our Challenges there.   We asked one of the founders, Michael Gold, to tell us a bit more about the project: read the full story.

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. In his occasional series of emailed newsletters, Shepherd gives readers glimpses into the future by unveiling or hinting at some fascinating developments at Microsoft. He also happens to be a super nice guy and a moral supporter of SciCheer’s efforts. Follow him on Twitter @lewisshepherd . When he posts, the world listens

Last night, he announced Code Dallas, a tool Microsoft just deployed in what some are calling the War for the Web. For the tech geeks out there, here’s Shepherd’s description:

Microsoft’s Information Services business, which developers and information workers can use to find and manage Web services and datasets  – free or paid – to power their apps, on any platform. Dallas is built completely on the Windows Azure cloud platform, which includes a SQL Azure cloud database, so you get the ability to store structured and unstructured data whether from Dallas’s “data-as-a-service” or your own collections, to invoke and examine the data without having to parse it, to use REST services to manipulate and move the data, and to analyze the data using the new PowerPivot high-end analytics for Excel 2010 spreadsheets, for example.

If you want to see the future of Microsoft, and the future of the web and computing as we see it, as Shepherd puts it, Ray Ozzie laid out in his keynote address, streamed live today at 11:30 eastern time, 8:30 am Pacific, over at http://microsoftpdc.com/.  Replay it at your convenience.

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.