Innovation and Crowdsourcing with DARPA’s Dan Kaufman
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is one of the leading practitioners of open innovation.
The most visible components of which are its crowdsourcing contests such as the shredder challenge to help the US military reconstruct shredded documents and the competition that produced the world’s first crowdsourced military vehicle.
DARPA is working hard to develop tools to fully empower the crowd and allow it to work at its maximum potential. In the following two video interviews Dan Kaufman the Director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office talks about innovation and challenges facing the agency as well offering insights into crowdsourcing and how to stay innovative in the competitive technology industry.
The first interview is with John Markoff, the tech writer for The New York Times – the first in a series of conversations with “amazing people at research labs” being produced this summer by the Computer History Museum. It was held on July 24th.
During this wide-ranging interview Kaufman touches on DARPA’s history, his own background and how he came to the agency, privacy and big data, and current projects that he’s spearheading.
The second interview is with Intel Free Press and was conducted after the interview with John Markoff. Some of salient points to come out of this interview are:
- The need to determine which of your company’s projects are right for crowdsourcing and which are not
- Crowdsourcing is not free labour, “I think it has to be interactive,” said Kaufman. “And for crowdsourcing to really work they [members of the crowd] have to have a say in the outcome, but also a say in the problem.”
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