You Don’t Need to be a Rocket Scientist…

I recently came across a BusinessWeek article on open innovation. The article mostly centered on InnoCentive, which has become the poster child for the phenomenon.

Here’s an intriguing fact from the article:

Karim Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School, has documented that many of the awards went to Solvers outside the discipline of the problem. Lakhani’s research report observed that, “The further the focal problem was from the solvers’ field of expertise, the more likely they were to solve it.”

I found this particularly interesting. Sometimes the most complicated problem could have the simplest and most elegant solution. Sometimes you don’t need an expert, just someone who looks at the world differently. You won’t know if you don’t try.

I’m reminded of a short story my brother once told me:

The Americans wanted to figure out a way to write in outer space. As gravity was minimal, the ink in pens would not flow properly. They spent a lot of money and time to solve this problem, and eventually, they came up with a state-of-the-art pen that defied gravity - the space pen. And you know what the Russians did? They used a pencil.

Some other noteworthy points from the article are:

* Since 2001, more than 170,000 participants from over 175 different countries have registered as Solvers
* More than 800 problems have been posted and almost 400 solutions have been found
* Monetary awards ranged from around $5,000 to $1 million
* InnoCentive receives a posting fee of $35,000 for each project

It is also interesting that InnoCentive gets a sizeable return even if no solution has been found. InnoCentive’s total revenue to date is $28 million; not bad for a somewhat new concept with 32 employees. And this may just be a beginning.