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Open Innovation Contest to Address Key Challenges in Pakistan

Nov-30-13 By IdeaConnection
Every company and organisation wants to get its hands on the next big thing, a product, service or innovation that will solve unmet needs and boost the bottom line or cure social and environmental problems.

One of the best ways to source these innovations is through open innovation competitions, either because they catalyse creative minds or they encourage innovators to come out of their corners

The Pakistan Innovation Foundation (PIF) and Indus Motor Company (IMC) has recently announced the launch of the National Innovation Grand Challenge (NICG) 2013-14 to solve some of the country’s key challenges.

Thanksgiving Turkeys Inspire Innovators

Nov-28-13 By IdeaConnection
As millions of Americans tuck into turkey on today’s Thanksgiving Day, The Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch has provided some very digestible reading material on how America has become a hotbed of turkey innovation.

Dozens of the country’s inventors hold patents for different ways of cooking the plump-breasted bird.

Crowdsourcing App to Log Your Dreams

Nov-27-13 By IdeaConnection
Like most people you’ve probably had an entertaining dream and then forgotten it almost as soon as the alarm clock has woken you up. Researchers believe that we forget about 95% of our dreams before we’ve even thrown off the duvet. Well, that could be all about to change with the invention of a new dream-catching app.

The BBC has featured an interview with Hunter Soik, a Korean-American living in New York who has developed a smartphone app that will allow people to record and share their dreams.

Advice on How to Crowdsource Successfully

Nov-24-13 By IdeaConnection
Done well, crowdsourcing can produce good innovation results in quicker time frames and at lower costs. It is not an innovation panacea, more a useful tool to further equip a company’s innovation arsenal.

Mindful that many companies fail with some of their crowdsourcing projects Business News Daily has provided its readers with some useful tips on how to do crowdsourcing successfully.

Developing a New Open Innovation Model

Nov-21-13 By IdeaConnection
Open innovation thought leader and author of Making Open Innovation Work Stefan Lindegaard is busy developing a new OI model on how companies can embrace open innovation – and he would like your input.

In a recent blog post on his 15inno site, Stefan raises the point that there are too few processes and models to help companies wanting to engage with open innovation. This is something he wants to change.

How IdeaConnection Helps You Benefit from Emerging Technologies

Nov-18-13 By IdeaConnection
Is your company known for leaping on hot, new technologies and creating successful business models from them? Or does it prevaricate and wait for months, potentially missing out on myriad opportunities as competitors get there first?

The American writer and thinker Steward Brand once commented that, “Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”

IdeaConnection’s Emerging Technologies service is a powerful platform that sources emerging technologies before they are made available to the public.

Crowdsourcing Help for the Smithsonian’s Collections

Nov-15-13 By IdeaConnection
The US Herbarium at the Natural History Museum’s Botany Department needs your help in a colossal digitization projection.

There are approximately 5 million plant specimens within its collections, but the labels of most of them cannot be read by computers. This is where you can come in to help make the materials, documents and knowledge more widely available to researchers and members of the public.

Polar Bear Researchers Experiment with Crowdsourcing

Nov-11-13 By IdeaConnection
Crowdsourcing is leading to the involvement of ever greater numbers of citizen scientists in scientific research. One of the latest projects to pull in the enthusiastic amateurs is a scheme to track polar bear migration.

Scientists from Polar Bears International and Explore.org are studying the effects of climate change on polar bears and want to see if the crowd can successfully help them in their research.

Why Innovation Success Needs Failure

Nov-08-13 By IdeaConnection
Many organisations have a very uneasy relationship with failure. It simply isn’t acceptable.  Employees from the CEO down are scared of the word and its consequences, so much so that conservatism rules the day.  In such an environment disruptive innovations are choked off long before an original thought is given room to breathe.

In a post on the Ventureburn website titled 'Failure isn't just good, it allows for extraordinary innovation' Mbali Ndandani says, “When organisations don’t allow their employees to fail, they are paying lip service to innovation. It really is that simple.”

Ndandani goes on to point out the famous example of Thomas Edison’s 1, 093 failures before he developed his version of the light bulb.  She wonders aloud whether organisations would allow their employees to fail so many times.

Open Innovation Can Lead to Faster Drug Creation

Nov-06-13 By IdeaConnection
Faster drug creation and swifter publication of research results can be achieved by providing academics with tools and information in the public domain. That’s the view of the Director of Academic Liaison for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).

Malcolm Skingle was talking with The Information Daily at a recent cancer research event in the UK. He discussed how open innovation can benefit the entire scientific community.