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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.

Contribute to Crowdsourcing Historic Documents

May-20-11 By Aminda
With the lazy days of summer approaching, why not relax while contributing some of your time to some library research. A couple major libraries have received global attention for their successful efforts in crowdsourcing the transcription of archived work.

Comparing Corporate and Consumer Innovation

May-19-11 By Aminda
The New York Times recently reported on a large-scale survey of consumer innovation, financed by the British government. What the team discovered, was that the amount of money individual consumers spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product research and development over a three-year period.

The Effect of Social Influence on the Wisdom of the Crowd

May-18-11 By Aminda
A new study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds limitations on the premise that the average of many individuals’ estimates can be more accurate than that of individuals.

U.S. Navy Launches Problem-solving Platform

May-17-11 By Aminda
The U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) launched yesterday a new Internet wargame designed to solve the real-world problem of piracy facing the Navy.
The ONR has recruited 1,000 players from across the government, education and private sector to participate in a three-week Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLI) exercise.
The initial challenge of combating piracy off the coast of Somalia is a demonstration of the platform, which is designed to support large numbers of distributed players in synchronous and asynchronous ideation and action planning, with an eye to surfacing innovative, outlier strategies.

How Crowdsourcing is Growing Interest in Science

May-16-11 By Aminda
This age of social media and interconnectivity is providing more and more ways for members of the public to contribute time and service towards scientific awareness and progress.

Applications to Aid the Blind

May-13-11 By Aminda
A recent post highlighted a project to refine the capabilities of Mechanical Turk for use in software applications. While MIT researchers work on that project, University of Rochester scientists have taken a similar concept and created a way to aid the blind.
VizWiz is an iPhone app that works in conjunction with a Turkit application, allowing a blind user to snap a photo of something, record a question about something shown in the photograph, and then receive an answer back within seconds. Designing a computer program that can reliably recognize text and distinguish objects in the real world has proven to be a massive challenge for artificial intelligence researchers.

Definition of Open Government

May-12-11 By Aminda