Innocentive

Innocentive brings together companies in need of creative scientific and technical problem-solving, and the free cooperation of scientists, engineers and creators generally, at http://www.innocentive.com/ .

It had 83,000 cooperating scientists during mid-2005 and amongst its corporate users were Boeing and Procter & Gamble.

Citation

From an article in Wired magazine [1] about Crowdsourcing and Distributed Labor Networks

"Pharmaceutical maker Eli Lilly funded InnoCentive’s launch in 2001 as a way to connect with brainpower outside the company – people who could help develop drugs and speed them to market. From the outset, InnoCentive threw open the doors to other firms eager to access the network’s trove of ad hoc experts. Companies like Boeing, DuPont, and Procter & Gamble now post their most ornery scientific problems on InnoCentive’s Web site; anyone on InnoCentive’s network can take a shot at cracking them.

The companies – or seekers, in InnoCentive parlance – pay solvers anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 per solution. (They also pay InnoCentive a fee to participate.) Jill Panetta, InnoCentive’s chief scientific officer, says more than 30 percent of the problems posted on the site have been cracked, “which is 30 percent more than would have been solved using a traditional, in-house approach."

The solvers are not who you might expect. Many are hobbyists working from their proverbial garage, like the University of Dallas undergrad who came up with a chemical to use inart restoration, or the Cary, North Carolina, patent lawyer who devised a novel way to mix large batches of chemical compounds.

This shouldn’t be surprising, notes Karim Lakhani, a lecturer in technology and innovation at MIT, who has studied InnoCentive. “The strength of a network like InnoCentive’s is exactly the diversity of intellectual background," he says. Lakhani and his three coauthors surveyed 166 problems posted to InnoCentive from 26 different firms. “We actually found the odds of a solver’s success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise," Lakhani says. He has put his finger on a central tenet of network theory, what pioneering sociologist Mark Granovetter describes as “the strength of weak ties." The most efficient networks are those that link to the broadest range of information, knowledge, and experience" (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html?)

Discussion

Commentary by Sami Viitamaki:

"Innocentive fits the category of crowdsourcing that does not fully utilize the community’s ‘wisdom of crowds’. The solvers pursue the solution in isolation from each other, and the possibility of using the community to gather comments on the alternatives, build on others’ ideas, find a winning solution by community rating, etc. is absent.

In my thesis I call these kind of companies ‘Crowdsourcing Brokers’, for they really simply gather up alternative solutions from a large member base for their own clients’ needs and leave deciding on the winning solution to the clients. Given the nature of the competition in these kind of efforts and the considerable monetary rewards involved, the approach is naturally understandable. Other ‘broker’ approach companies are e.g. iStockphoto and Holotof advertising."

An alternative to this approach is the FLIRT Model of Crowdsourcing