Crowdsourcing Innovation: Q&A with Dwayne Spradlin of InnoCentive
Tuesday, December 23, 2008 at 03:16PM In recent years, corporations have turned to open innovation to solve their toughest research problems and reduce runaway costs of R&D. Now non-profits are beginning to see prize-based innovation as a strategy for humanitarian causes too, such as developing medicines to fight tuberculosis in the developing world, cleaning up oil spills or designing solar technologies for villages in rural India and Africa. InnoCentive is the premier open innovation marketplace in the world, where corporations and non-profits post their toughest research problems and a global network of 160,000 solvers takes a crack at solving them for cash rewards. Non-profit challenges have grown to about 20 percent of the InnoCentive portfolio, up from virtually none only two years ago. In this Q&A, InnoCentive president and CEO Dwayne Spradlin explains why crowdsourcing is becoming a powerful tool for doing good.