Crowdsourced Innovation for the Common Good

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October 11, 2009

innovative social enterprise: Earth Face image

For better or worse, much of the buzz around leveraging the wisdom of the crowds has been around open source efforts like Linux, customer-driven sites like MyStarbucksIdea, and incentivized commercial innovation efforts like InnoCentive, Idea Connection, and the Cisco iPrize.

Less noise has been made around crowdsourcing efforts for the greater good that seek to change our world for the better.

People may be well aware of efforts such as these:

The Xprize Foundation, which has already awarded a $10 million prize to the first private team to launch a rocket into space. The first Xprize ignited a $1 Billion private space industry and the minds of millions of children in the process. The foundation now has four new public challenges – the Google Lunar Xprize, the Progressive Automotive Xprize (100 mpg cars), the Archon Xprize for Genomics (fast genome sequencing), and the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.
The Freedom Prize Foundation will be awarding over $4 Million in Freedom Prizes to inspire Industry, Schools, Government, Military, and Communities to significantly reduce their use of oil, thereby promoting America’s national security, economic prosperity and health. The foundation is focused on inspiring what can be done today to start getting the United States off oil.

But there are also lesser-known organizations like these:

Ashoka’s Changemakers is a community of action where people can collaborate on solutions to world problems. The community provides the platform for people to attack projects one idea at a time as they attempt to solve the world’s most pressing social problems.
philOptima is a site focused on connecting researchers with grant makers. They work primarily in education, health, public safety, governmental oversight, and the environment.
my health innovation is a newcomer similar to MyStarbucksIdea, but focused on collecting innovative health care ideas and getting hospitals, caregivers and patients to use them. They want to make the experience of health care as close to perfect as possible.

Does ‘For Good’ Crowdsourced Innovation Work?

Proof that it does has just arrived in the form of the renewal of a partnership between the Rockefeller Foundation and InnoCentive to link non-profit organizations to more than 175,000 world-class scientific thinkers to help develop solutions for their work on behalf of the world’s most poor and vulnerable populations. The partnership was launched in 2006, and so far the two organizations have run ten challenges, resulting in an astonishing 80 percent success rate.

Non-profits can apply, through the Rockefeller Foundation, to place their organization’s scientific or technological Challenges on InnoCentive’s Website. The Rockefeller Foundation will choose the proposal that best fits its needs and fund the award given to the Solver using a grant.

Will this proven success inspire more scientists, non-profits, and companies to participate in open innovation for the greater good?

One can only hope.

About the Author: Braden Kelley, Founder of Business Strategy Innovation and author of Blogging Innovation, has been advising companies on how to increase their revenue and cut their costs since 1996. He has maximized profits for companies in Japan, Germany, England, and the United States.