screenshot: innocentive.com
Roland Piquepaille wrote about a web-based community of 80.000 scientists that solve biological and chemical problems for big companies and a BusinessWeek-Article about mass collaboration on the Internet.
“Back in 2001, the management of Eli Lilly decided to see if thousands of researchers around the world, and available via the Web, could help its own scientists to find new ideas. And it decided to invest a few million dollars in a young startup company, InnoCentive, short for “Innovation Incentive.” Eli Lilly was soon followed by Procter & Gamble, Dow, DuPont, Boeing and more than 30 other large companies.
Here is how this collaborative technology works. Imagine that you are a company needing to find an answer to a problem that your own teams have not solved. You, as a “seeker,” contact InnoCentive which will post your challenge on the Web, with all the guarantees of anonymity of course. And Innocentive will post the challenge on the Net. Its network of 80,000 independent self-selected “solvers” living in more than 170 countries, will then try to solve this problem.
After a solution is evaluated and accepted, the “solver” will receive an award ranging from $10,000 to $100,000.”
related links
Roland Piquepaille: The Power of Internet Collaborative Tools
InnoCentive.com
