Alph Bingham Joins BIF Research Advisory Council

Alph Bingham was one of my favorite storytellers from the BIF-2 summit. I'm so happy to announce that he has been appointed to our Research Advisory Council. Alph is the co-founder and President/CEO of InnoCentive, a Web-based community launched in 2001 that matches companies facing R&D challenges with scientists who propose solutions. His experience in developing new R&D organizational structures and new approaches to harnessing human intellect will be a tremendous benefit to our BIF community.

Basically, Alph’s 'pay-for-play' approach to innovation allows companies to extend their knowledge base to include tens of thousands of 'solvers' eager to tackle problems that R&D departments have been unable to resolve. In return, these solvers are paid a fee. Of the several hundred challenges posted on InnoCentive since it opened, about a third have been solved. The average posted reward is about $30,000; the highest awarded amounts to date have reached $75,000 (though higher bounties have been offered.)

Here's what Alph had to say about his business model: "What we effectively provide is an open innovation marketplace where companies can get a problem worked on immediately. We can buy and sell intellectual power without the costs associated with facilities, recruiting, career management, negotiations, custom contracting, etc."

Prior to Innocentive, Alph served in various capacities at Lilly, including head of Pharmaceutical Research, Director of Formulations Research and Development, Director of Medical Planning and Strategy, and Managing Director of the Lilly Development Centre in Belgium.

“Thinking about the way scientific creativity manifests, it’s not always a given that the next problem you encounter will be solved by a Nobel laureate. Perhaps it will be by some guy at a rural, private college in Vermont or a small research facility in China or an East German startup,” he says. “So we asked ourselves, if we had enough diversity of exposure, would we get novel solutions? And the answer was yes.”

You Can’t Corner the Market on Smarts
With a B.S. in chemistry from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford University, Alph has spent a lot of time in the lab. He remembers well how his professors would turn to the 20 or 30 graduate students and post-docs in their research group and ask for their help in solving some complicated problem or another. The students would come back with 20 or 30 different answers, some of which might prove more useful in resolving the impasse, others less so.

Watching the way industry works, where a problem only gets exposed to a handful of minds, things get invented, or problems get solved, based on resource allocation. Which means that who is available to respond to a given challenge may not necessarily be the one who is best qualified to respond.

“Indeed,” explains Alph, “who’s ‘best’ may not even be knowable as solutions often involve a complex interplay between training, experience and serendipity.” He has likened his concept to talk radio: If you broadcast an obscure question to millions of listeners, someone out there is likely to call in with the correct answer.

Today, several dozen ‘seeker’ companies have signed up, posting challenges in a wide range of scientific disciplines, including the fields of chemistry, applied sciences and the life sciences, and offering rewards ranging from $10,000 to $125,000 for working solutions.

In turn, nearly 125,000 ‘solvers’ from some 175 countries have registered on the InnoCentive site, where they can find new challenges each week. Tens of thousands of solvers might read the abstract of a challenge but only a few hundred who think they can realistically solve it continue to the details.

From the hundreds of challenges posted on InnoCentive since it opened, about a third have been solved. In return for the reward, scientists who present solutions sign over the intellectual property rights.

Benefits Outweigh Perceived Risks: Open Innovation is Here to Stay
Alph compares his model to bounty hunting. While companies have spent more than a million dollars on challenges they’ve solved through InnoCentive, that’s much less than it would have cost to invest in internal r&d to resolve them. Most importantly, they’ve paid ONLY for solutions and not for attempted solutions in the risky venture of R&D. Still, many companies remain reluctant to turn to outsiders for help with products in the pipeline. Fundamentally, most places still run the old, classic, ‘my lab, my walls’ system.'

Thomas Edison, the quintessential inventor, once said that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. Alph thinks it’s time to update that equation. “There will always be a lot of perspiration involved,” he told me, “but should the inspiration be 1 percent, or should we make it 10 percent by opening it up to a diverse net of human beings before you put the perspiration in?”

RELATED
Watch Alph Bingham at the BIF-2 Summit
Learn more about BIF's Research Advisory Council
Go to Innocentive

Posted December 17, 2007 08:55 AM by Chris Flanagan | Permalink