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Study Analyzes Social vs. Economic Incentives in Crowdsourced Work

Jun-04-11 By Aminda
A paper titled "Designing Incentives for Inexpert Human Raters," discusses an experiment which analyzed 14 different incentive structures for encouraging high-quality work from Mechanical Turk-style systems. Researchers found that workers perform most accurately when the task design credibly links payoffs to a worker’s ability to think about the answers that their peers are likely to provide.
Roughly 2,000 individuals participated in the study, resulting in over 100 subjects in each of the experimental conditions. Workers answered five questions which had been drawn from a study for which validated data existed

Microsoft First Member of Litigation Avoidance Program

Jun-02-11 By Aminda
Patent research provider Article One Partners, has announced a new Litigation Avoidance program, which utilizes crowdsourcing to challenge and invalidate specious software patents sometimes used in expensive lawsuits brought by so-called patent trolls.                               
Microsoft has been announced as the charter member of the paid service, which identifies pre-litigation patents and distributes requests to Article One’s global online community of 1 million scientists and technologists to research the validity of the patents. Article One uses that collected research, where appropriate, to file reexamination requests with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Drug Companies Changing to Stay Competitive

Jun-01-11 By Aminda
Whether or not the world’s major drug companies know the name Henry Chesbrough or know of his grim assessment of the future of drug development, they seem to be responding and changing the way they do R&D.
Facing looming patent expirations, Pfizer, is establishing a new network of academic centers designed to refill Pfizer’s pipeline with company-academic teams that will work side-by-side to speed drug discovery efforts. The first two centers are U.S. based and Pfizer has plans to expand to Europe and Asia next year.

Join Jeff Howe and the World’s Largest Book Club

May-31-11 By Aminda
The book publishing industry, just like the news industry, has struggled to find an identity over the past couple decades with large box stores taking over small corner bookstores only to soon be replaced by online retailers. Now, just as it looked like the pastime of reading was experiencing a complete decline, technologies and innovations look to revive and transform the industry. ebook readers are making books cool again, independent publishing is making it irresistibly affordable and new formats— falling somewhere between a short book or a long magazine article— offer something for everyone.

UK Study of Intellectual Property and Growth

May-30-11 By Aminda
A UK Study of Intellectual Property and Growth resulted in a recently published report making recommendations for improving the UK’s copyright system. The report is the result of an intensive 6 month independent review commissioned by Prime Minister David Cameron on the basis of a ministerial concern that in a digital age the country’s intellectual property framework was not keeping pace with new innovation and growth models. The results substanciated this theory, finding that the UK’s intellectual property framework, especially with regard to copyright, is falling behind what is needed. The report made 10 key recommendations, which are summed up here.
1. Evidence. Government should ensure that development of the IP System is driven as far as possible by objective evidence.

The Impact of Business on Education

May-28-11 By Aminda
Social media and public crowdsourcing of ideas has become the norm for tasks from deciding if you’re ready to have children, to making decisions on business strategies. We're not only used to asking input from others but also to being able to give our opinion on just about anything. Given this shift, it’s interesting to ask what the impact will be on future generations and the education system.

Recruiting the Next Generation of Innovators

May-27-11 By Aminda
For graduating American university students, the good news is that many companies plan to hire more entry-level workers this year than last. Unfortunately, while the job market is improving, many grads are still finding it tough to get work. Creativity, connections and hard work are imperative to standing out from the competition.
Businesses are also recognizing that recruiting the best from the next generation requires a different approach. Ketchum, a global communications firm, created a unique open innovation community for college students that has proven to not only be a valuable service for their clients but a valuable recruiting tool as well.

The Creation Challenge

May-25-11 By Aminda
The legendary, 30-year old story of the race between Xerox and Apple to revolutionize the PC industry has been exposed to new light in a recent New Yorker piece titled The Creation Myth which chronicles Steve Job’s 1979 visit to Xerox’s innovation center and how it changed his direction for Apple’s next generation of personal computers.

Crowdsourcing’s Coming of Age?

May-24-11 By Aminda
This year has already seen several major accomplishments for providers of crowdsourcing solutions. Clickworker, headquartered in Germany and provider of business services including SEO text creation and data authentication, in March announced the close of a 4.25 Million € Series B round of financing. About the same time, San Francisco- based Crowdflower announced that it has raised $7 million in its second round of funding. The second round of funding, used to spin out additional niche services for outsourcing, was oversubscribed.
 
Business School professor and blogger, Panos Ipeirotis, writes an interesting post explaining what he sees as being behind the rise in solutions that target a very specific vertical.

Secrets of the World’s Top Innovators

May-23-11 By Aminda
Booz & Company has recently released the results of their sixth annual Global Innovation 1000 study. The study has consistently shown that there is no statistically significant relationship between financial performance and innovation spending. However, the Consulting firm identifies what does matter, like the talent, knowledge, team structures, tools, and processes that combine to form a company’s distinct innovation strategy.
From the survey of the 1,000 public companies around the world that spend the most on research and development, Booz & Company identified three strategies that are most often utilized by these successful innovation companies.