EXP: open innovation Archives

EXP-like Videos

By Craig Kanarick on March 25, 2010 3:30 PM | No Comments

First, a great interview from Engadget with Nicholas Negroponte, who was the head of the MIT Media Lab when I was a graduate student there. What the interviewer, Josh Topolsky, correctly notices, is that Nicholas' book Being Digital, while 15 years old, holds up remarkable well in terms of its predictions. My favorite quote: "How can there possibly be books in the future?"

Thanks, David Young, for the great reference.

Next up, Henry Chesbrough, the person who coined the term "open innovation" and is considered the godfather of this important new field. While this video is really a sales video for an academic book, it is no less important in terms of future thinking.

Last, but certainly not least, is this video about Lee Odden talking about real-time marketing, what I think is the next (or current) wave in marketing.

Enjoy!

NYC BigApps Winners Announced

By Craig Kanarick on February 5, 2010 2:00 AM | No Comments

NYC BigApps is a contest to drive innovation in software that can help the city of New York become more sustainable through transparency, accessibility and accountability. The requirements were simple: write an web-based app that utilizes data from the NYC.gov "Data Mine" -- a catalog of sets of public data produced by local agencies.

The content awards $20K in cash prizes to 13 winners announced tonight. I know a lot of the judges and I think they did a great job acknowledging some really good entries. Personally, I think Trees Near You and WayFinder are the best of the best. Core77 has some in-depth reporting on these and other winners.

NYC BigApps

By Craig Kanarick on December 10, 2009 11:37 AM | No Comments

Combining open innovation and sustainability into one program, NYC BigApps is a competition (unfortunately already closed) to create an application focused on delivering honest and useful information to NYC residents.

The city asks that its wealth of talented developers design an application using at least one data source from the City of New York Data Mine, which includes a vast amount of issues spanning Special Waste Drop-off Sites to Library Events, in order to make the city government more accessible to all of its citizens.

While the submissions deadline has already passed, you can still take part by suggesting an app you would like to see created or submitting a data set you would like to see added the Data Mine list. And the best way to become involved is by voting, which will be open to the public shortly. Until then have a look at the NYC BigApps application gallery.

The Fun Theory

By Craig Kanarick on November 10, 2009 1:44 PM | No Comments

The Fun Theory is a new project from Volkswagen that integrates digital technology into every day physical experiences with the expressed goal of making sustainable behavior (walking up stairs, throwing away trash, etc) into fun activities. The theory is that if walking up stairs was more fun, more people would do it, and I agree. How great would it be if every staircase was a piano?

They are also using Open Innovation practices to extend the project by awarding a cash prize called the Fun Theory Award to people who submit similar ideas to the one illustrated below...

[ Thanks, Alex ]

Victors and Spoils: An Open Innovation Agency?

By Craig Kanarick on October 29, 2009 10:03 PM | No Comments

In today's Business section, the NY Times writes about Victors and Spoils, a new ad agency that claims it will specialize in crowdsourcing, calling it a fad but saying that they hope to be the first agency to "get it right.". The Times then refers to crowdsourcing as a form of open innovation.

It is nice to see models like open innovation continue to gain steam and for the paper of record here in New York noticing it.

Reflections on the 5 Year Anniversary of the Ansari X PRIZE

By Craig Kanarick on October 5, 2009 12:39 PM | No Comments

Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation wrote a heartfelt post on his blog last week to commemorate the 5 year anniversary of the Ansari X Prize for private commercial spaceflight. It is amazing to consider that in the five years since the prize was awarded (on October 4, 2004), over a billion dollars has been poured into this new industry.

Rather than recap his thoughts, my suggestion is to just go here and read it your self.

Two Weeks in September 2009: Open Innovation Madness

By Craig Kanarick on September 28, 2009 9:29 PM | No Comments

The past two weeks have been giant for Open Innovation.

One particular highlight was Armadillo Aerospace in Texas, who twice successfully flew a Scorpius lunar lander rocket in a two hour time frame on September 12, officially qualifying them for the top prize (which could be worth a cool $1 million) in the NASA Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. Requiring the simulation of such tasks as landing on, refueling on and lifting off from the moon, they had to fly horizontally from the launch pad to another pad 50 meters away for at least 3 minutes, then land on a simulated moon surface, then takeoff and fly back to the launch pad.

Even more exciting developments in the field include Netflix, who awarded a $1 million prize to the first group or individual who submitted an algorithm to improve their movie recommendation system by 10% or more. Coming out on top was a team called "Bellkor's Pragmatic Chaos," a 7-person team who met in person for the first time at breakfast the day the prize was awarded. The final stages of the competition spanning nearly three years are worthy of a movie, with teams combining and splitting apart, with the winning team submitting their answer just 24 minutes before another team. Netflix promptly announced their next $1 million prize will be awarded in two $500K payments to the team with the most progress at 6 and 12 months.

Philips announced they've submitted an entry to the US Department of Energy's $10 million L Prize for a significantly more efficient 60 watt bulb, the most popular bulb in America. Amost half of the billion light bulbs sold in America each year are 60 watt incandescent bulbs, so a sustainable solution would have a huge impact. You can read more in this New York Times article.

As you can see, the last two weeks have indeed seen huge acheivements in open innovation. So much so, in fact, that the Wall Street Journal called the awarding of the Netflix Prize a "Turning Point" in Open Innovation.

I agree.

Today in History: The Vin Fiz

By Craig Kanarick on September 17, 2009 10:23 AM | No Comments

On September 11, 1911, Calbraith Perry "Cal" Rodgers, 32, left Sheepshead Bay in New York in a small plane to try and win a $50,000 prize for being the first person to complete a transcontinental US flight.

His story is a fascinating one. He completed the journey in a month but was past the deadline for the prize that William Randolph Hearst put up. What makes this story crazy is that the pilot had only 90 minutes of flight instruction (from Orville Wright) before he made his first solo flight. Since there were no airports, navigation maps, control towers or beacons, the flight across the country was certainly a risky move.

You can read more about this on Centennial of Flight and on This Day in Tech.

How Does an Open Innovation Company Work With its Partners?

By Craig Kanarick on August 25, 2009 11:48 PM | No Comments

One of the aspects I find most exciting about the growth of open innovation is the consequent growth of firms' consulting services in order to better utilize open innovation to solve problems. How and why does that work? Watch Dwayne Spradlin, President and CEO of InnoCentive, explain how the process works in this quick and interesting video:

In this fascinating video about cleaning up the Exxon Valdez spill years after it happened, Spradlin explains why open innovation is essentially a sustainable business practice:

Monitoring the Twitterverse

By Craig Kanarick on August 24, 2009 3:09 PM | No Comments

According to a recent Mashable article, almost 70% of adults in the US don't know enough about Twitter to "have an opinion" about it. Even so, its popularity continues to grow and so do tools to measure it, complete with data visualizations to tell stories about these measurements. In this post, I'll cover a few of the ones I've been monitoring lately.

Twitalyzer measures traffic based on usernames (i.e. @kanarick) and defines derived values such as brand Strength, Signal, Favor, Passion and Clout based on that traffic. They also use globally aggregated data to create interesting lists such as the 100 most influential Twitterers. (Is 'Twitterer' a word?)

Open Brands, a service of Earthsite Labs, is a user-created directory of over 300 brands, which they call "Brand Channels," using the Twitalyzer measurements on both usernames and hashtags for slightly different results.

Along with content, a user's network is another slice of the Twitter ecosystem. TwitterFriends is a good stab at creating visualizations and data analysis of a network's shape and size. Here you can see some of the results of analyzing social media blogger, Dave Armano's network.

TweetEffect charts how a network changes in size between tweets, suggesting that you might find a pattern between what you tweet and how many people start or stop following you. I'm not convinced that any singular tweet really changes the size of your network, unless you specifically ask people to pass something on.

Blending a part of the real-time twitter stream with an artistic lens can create both beautiful and informative experiences that evolve over time. One of the best examples of this is well-known Twistori, an elegant unfolding experience of animated tweets that contain the words love, hate, think, believe, feel or wish. It makes a great screensaver and is never dull.

Ten Thousand Cents

By Craig Kanarick on August 21, 2009 5:14 AM | No Comments

Ten Thousand Cents is a innovative 2008 project from the talented Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima. For the project, they used Amazon's Mechanical Turk system to get 10,000 anonymous participants from over 50 countries to draw one small section of a $100 bill without knowing what they were drawing. They paid each artist one cent, for a total cost of $100. Using custom software written in Processing, the process was recorded from start to finish and combined together to create a fantastic application of a large community of users all working on one small part of a larger solution.

The animations are viewable online as a whole or individually, creating a unique rendition of a $100 bill. I particularly love looking at the different drawings to find the ways in which people draw, and to see the few "easter egg"-like drawings that have nothing to do with what they are meant to become.

Printed versions of the final images are available for $100 each (naturally) and all proceeds from the sales of each piece are donated to OLPC.

I just recently posted a presentation by Aaron, which you can see here.

Nike AM90 TV Ad Contest

By Craig Kanarick on August 19, 2009 10:47 AM | No Comments

To promote new colorways for their popular Air Max 90 sneaker, Nike just launched an open innovation contest: make a 28-second television ad by remixing various videos supplied on a website. The winner, chosen by Nike and Foot Locker, will be broadcast on MTV.

I love these types of contests - they are open to a huge community of participants and have to be extremely cost-effective. Yes, the sponsors are paying some money to administer the program and AKQA probably received a modest fee to design the interface, but it has to be way less money than they would have to pay an ad agency to get the same amount of creativity. They are using collaborative contest service eYeka, which features a slew of other video and graphics contests.

I really loved when Doritos did a similar thing with Crash the Super Bowl, a contest last year where people had a few months to produce ads and post them online. The community then chose a winner which was broadcast during the Super Bowl. Creator of the ad, Joe Herbert, not only saw his ad on the Super Bowl, but was flown to the game and awarded a $1 million prize!

(Thanks @tombed)

Nasa's New Green Challenge

By Craig Kanarick on August 6, 2009 1:06 AM | No Comments

Last week, NASA and the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency (CAFE) Foundation announced the a $1.5 million dollar prize for aircraft that can average at least 100 mph on a 200-mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon. Calling it the Green Flight Challenge, this program joins the 6-year old Nasa Centennial Challenges, which also include the $2 miliion Power Beaming Challenge, a Tether Challenge (see below), the Regolith Excavation Challenge, the $1.6 million Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X Prize Challenge and Astronaut Glove Challenge sponsored by the Innovative Partnerships Program and seeks to spur the development of high-efficiency aircraft. This contest is not only innovative, it is the most sustainable NASA challenge yet.

SF Chronicle on Open Innovation

By Craig Kanarick on August 6, 2009 1:01 AM | No Comments

Covering similar territory as the the recent article in the NY Times, The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote about Open Innovation, starting the story by explaining the recent Netflix Prize, set to announce a winner in just a few weeks. Companies Use Contests to Drive Innovation is the title of the article and it quotes people from Innocentive and Henry Chesbrough, credited with coining the term "open innovation." It is a good overview and introduction to the field for many audiences.

And the Winner is...

By Craig Kanarick on July 21, 2009 9:54 PM | No Comments

My excitement about open innovation, especially prize-driven contests, was piqued when I attended the X Prize "incentive2innovate" conference in New York earlier this year. One of the best things at that conference was a report created by McKinsey entitled "And the winner is...".

I encourage you to read the entire 124 pages and to pique your interest here are some interesting highlights:

The above chart highlights how drastically the field has grown over the past decade. As a result, an entire industry has sprung up around the funding, administration and support of these prizes. Even though prizes have been around for centuries, this type of growth can only lead to new models of thought and new modes of doing business. Accompanying this rapid growth has been a drastic shift from prizes primarily in the arts and sciences to the fields of engineering and technology.

The report highlights how prizes are particularly well-suited to specific goals including:

identifying excellence
influencing public perception
focusing communities on specific problems
mobilizing new talent
strengthening problem-solving communities
educating individuals
mobilizing capital

Their success depends on many factors but the report explains how they respond well to the recent trends of new wealth outside of traditional philanthropic charities, a frustration with traditional approaches to change, different approaches to allocating risk in the development of new ideas and greater global interconnectedness through technology.

The report is a crucial read bible for anyone wanting more information about the value of prizes, how to structure prize-driven competitions and more.

Best Buy Gets It

By Craig Kanarick on July 20, 2009 3:33 PM | No Comments

Best Buy is using real-time communications and open innovation as a model for recruiting a new Senior Manager of Emerging Media.

When the job posting, first made public by a recruiter on Twitter, specified over 250 Twitter followers as a job requirement, lots of online chatter ensued. In response, Best Buy's CMO Barry Judge decided to create an online contest for the best job description using their robust Idea X platform. The contest just ended and the winning job description hasn't been officially posted, but you can read the submissions as well as the motivations for the project on Barry's blog.

Dynamic World Sustainability Visualizations

By Craig Kanarick on July 20, 2009 1:10 PM | No Comments

The World Bank recently published an interactive data visualization about poverty, hunger, child mortality and other global challengs. Called Building a Better World, the site uses two different modes of visualizations for each of the key statistics: one using a traditional geographic projection, the other with the sizes of the countries distorted to the size of the data being represented.

The World Bank is just one such organization devoted to sustainability issues utilizing the web to visualize important information about their projects. The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) has an entire "statistics portal" filled with information including Country Statistics, an interactive Factbook, and my favorite, the Factbook eXplorer, which combines stories and statistics with great impact.

Gapminder is group promoting sustainable development and is well-known in certain circles from founder Hans Rosling's presentations at TED, which is one of the first places I point people when I want to explain the power of great data visualizations. Here is his first TED presentation:

You can watch two more here and here. His data visualization software was so powerful that the founders of Google, who he met at TED, purchased it in 2007 and is now available for free.

When these and other organizations are soliciting for new funds, they might be interested in looking at Philanthropy In/Sight, a Google Maps mashup launched by The Foundation Center last week to explore "giving patterns, emerging trends and funding relationships globally, nationally, or at the community level." Grants, grantmakers, needs and impacts can all be viewed and sorted by various criteria with data updated weekly. The site currently has information on almost 100,000 grantmakers accounting for over 1.5 million individual grants.

Thanks, Blog About Stats and The Agitator

The NYT on Open Innovation

By Craig Kanarick on July 19, 2009 11:14 PM | No Comments

Heavily tweeted in the open innovation community, a recent article called Crowdsourcing Works, When It's Focused, calls open innovation "popular and appealing" and gives a good overview of this growing field.

The power of open innovation

By Craig Kanarick on July 9, 2009 11:02 PM

In 1714 the British government offered a prize for the first person or team of persons to create a device that would measure longitude. In 1927, Charles Lindberg won the Orteig prize for being the first aviator to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. Prize-driven innovation contests have been around for a long time and have been used to change people's mindsets about the possibilities of science and art.

Like the open-source software movement, the past decade has seen an explosion in the field of prize-driven contests, in many ways enabled by digital network-based collaboration opportunities. For example, the Netflix Prize, a prize for $1 million to the first team that can improve the current Netflix recommendation system by 10% was entered by over 20,000 teams from over 180 countries. If they had hired those over-50,000 people as employees, it would have costs them much more than $1 million.

The amount of prize money being offered to the public for innovation is growing exponentially. Because of this rapid growth, the rapid change in the field, and the effectiveness of well-designed contests, prize-driven open innovation is a useful tool available to companies needing to solve a range of problems.

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