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Can You Replicate a Culture of Innovation?

Dec-27-13 By IdeaConnection
What exactly is a culture of innovation? Can its essence be bottled and sprinkled on companies to help them steal a march on their competitors? Or as The Atlantic magazine ponders, can you replicate the ethos, values and behaviors of Silicon Valley, one of the most innovative places on the planet?

In seeking out the answers, the publication featured extracts of a conversation between a historian and a librarian, held at The Atlantic's Silicon Valley summit.

Crowdfunded Lego Car Powered By Air

Dec-22-13 By IdeaConnection
What’s made of plastic breaks, was funded by the crowd and can reach a top speed of around 20km/h fueled by nothing but air? The answer is an air-powered car built of Lego by Australian entrepreneur, Steve Sammartino and a Romanian technologist, Raul Oaida. The innovative pair met on the internet.

The machine used more than 500,000 pieces of Lego and has four air-powered engines and 256 pistons, also constructed out of Lego.

Open Innovation Contest Offers $100,000 in Prize Money

Dec-21-13 By IdeaConnection
The 2014 Shale Gas Innovation Competition organized by the Ben Franklin Shale Gas Innovation and Commercialization Center (SGICC) is offering awards totaling $100,000 to the four best shale gas-oriented innovations, new product ideas, or service concepts.

The contest is for researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs in Pennsylvania or West Virginia or those willing to locate to either state. Any idea related to shale energy will be welcomed, even if it has already been commercially developed.

NPR Compiles its Innovation Wish List

Dec-19-13 By IdeaConnection
Have you got an idea for a great innovation, a superlative product that meets an unmet need and makes life easier for all of us? Throughout 2013 people have been sending their ideas to NPR’s All Tech Considered.

The blog has recently compiled a list of some of its favorite submissions and they include reversible tattoos, expandable Tupperware and steering wheel fans.

Crowdsourcing Blood Donations

Dec-17-13 By IdeaConnection
We’ve seen several examples of how crowdsourcing can be deployed to save lives such as using the crowd to create a database of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) in the Philadelphia area and social media-based projects to improve disaster relief.

Now the Singapore Red Cross (SRC) is launching what it describes as the world’s first crowdsourcing app for blood donations – the Red Cross Connection.

3 Fascinating TED Talks on Innovation

Dec-14-13 By IdeaConnection
“Everyone’s using the word but I do not think it means what they think it means.” That’s an intriguing opening gambit of a TED Talk on innovation by Carl Bass the president and chief executive officer of Autodesk, Inc.

TED Talks provide rocket fuel for the brain, a series of short and inspiring discourses covering a wide range of scientific and cultural topics. Here are some of the talks on innovation that have caught our attention:

Defense Agency Turns to Open Innovation for Technology Needs

Dec-11-13 By IdeaConnection
The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has launched an open innovation portal called Needipedia to find solutions to some of its pressing needs.

The aim of the platform is to circumvent the often slow procurement process for emerging technologies and harness a more diverse base of solution providers.

Crowdsourcing Uncovers New Cancer Cell-Killing Compound

Dec-08-13 By IdeaConnection
Citizen science has chalked up another successful achievement after playing a significant role in the discovery of an anti-cancer compound. A soil sample sent to University of Oklahoma scientists by a woman from Alaska was found to contain a compound that’s toxic to certain types of cancer cells.

The work is part of a crowdsourcing project set up by the University of Oklahoma to analyse soil samples from across the United States.

Instant Answers to Open Innovation Questions

Dec-05-13 By IdeaConnection
Help is at hand for science researchers who want to engage with open innovation but are unsure about where to go and how to go about it. A free guide has just been released called ”Open Innovation – A Handbook for Researchers”.

The book includes advice on how researchers can apply open innovation in their work, and it helps them to navigate this way of innovating.

Open Innovation Provides Energy Saving Solutions

Dec-02-13 By IdeaConnection
Increasingly, open innovation methodologies are being applied to energy and fuel economy problems to help protect the planet and save us money.

IdeaConnection's large library of open innovation case studies contains a number of success stories of where crowd ingenuity has been applied to energy challenges.

In today's post we are highlighting some of the projects that have caught our attention: