The World Economic Forum wrapped up at Davos last week with universal agreement that we need to collectively question our current problem-solving methods.
In a session at the Forum last week, Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics observed, “Davos this year is framed around the idea that the world is busted. We’re here to see if multi-stakeholder networks can solve problems” — singling out the growing significance of the open innovation marketplace.
His speech was close on the heels of another groundbreaking collaborative innovation challenge from our company, InnoCentive. Wired.com reported a new challenge on InnoCentive in which Harvard will use government funding to generate not only answers to medical challenges around Type 1 diabetes but questions that will spark new ways of thinking about the disease.
“We want questions as well as answers, and we need to get them from a broader community because the same old people asking the same old questions in the same old way with slightly newer technology is not moving things fast enough or broadly enough for us to cope with these incredibly complicated diseases,” said Dr. Eva Guinan, director of Harvard Catalyst Linkages and co-leader of this InnoCentive project.
“When the United States government funds a crowdsourced social network at the oldest university in the country to make medical research more effective, it’s hard to deny that the Obama administration is making good on at least part of its pledge to bring the government and the institutions in line with the latest technology,” reported Eliot van Buskirk on Wired.com.
We couldn’t say it better ourselves. Spencer Trask is focused on bringing together great minds and great talent to build the big ideas of tomorrow. We’re excited by InnoCentive’s progress in this space and look forward to accelerated results in worth and worthiness as more sectors and geographies embrace the power of crowd-based innovation.
