Networked Innovation Initiatives

= Open Innovation initiatives

Examples

From Diego Rodriguez:

"Global Social Business Incubator (GSBI). Based at Santa Clara University, it provides an innovative mix of both physical and virtual collaboration and education to enable social entrepreneurs to scale their endeavors and achieve sustainability. GSBI has a two week “course” they offer each year, as well as pre and postcourse mentoring and collaboration using a wiki platform with a distributed network of experienced entrepreneurs and business experts who volunteer to help the social entrepreneurs grow their organizations through better business plans, financial models, improved presentation skills and fundraising strategies.

Innocentive. A commercial spin-out of Lilly, it uses a network of researchers and scientists to speed up scientific and medical discoveries. Innocentive provides an online innovation marketplace to bring together “seekers” who want solutions to problems in the sciences (physical, math, chemistry, life, and computer), engineering and design, business and entrepreneurship, with 125,000 “solvers” located in 175 countries around the world. The “seekers” offer cash rewards for solutions to their problems that are meaningful to individuals. They provide an anonymous system for linking these two groups and for safeguarding the intellectual property. They encourage non-profit organizations to use their service and are beginning to move from a one to one relationship to the development of a community collaboration model.

X PRIZE Foundation. A group using competitions and prize models to accelerate innovation. Although the prize model is not new (per Wikipedia, between 1907 and 1919 the Daily Mail newspaper in the UK offered 14 prizes for various achievements in aviation), because of the Web and modern media, the scale and reach of the X Prize Foundation is unprecedented. They are branching out from their first prize in human spaceflight to many new domains including genomics and automotive challenges. As with Mozilla and Meetup, the X Prize Foundation is not a network per se, but rather a central node in a network of its own making. Their primary contribution is to encourage others to collaborate in order to solve extremely difficult challenges." (http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/itgg.2007.2.3.3)