It was only a matter of time before open source made its way to science. InnoCentive has made the jump, and quite successfully, according to today’s article in the New York Times. InnoCentive connects companies, academic institutions, public sector and non-profit organizations, all hungry for breakthrough innovation, with a global network of more than 145,000 of the world’s brightest minds on the world’s first Open Innovation Marketplace™.
Cross-pollination and crowdsourcing, all wrapped up in one place for global problem solving, I love it! The world has never been smaller . . .
Pretty interesting analysis here:
http://www.avidior.org/blog/2008/02/25/innocentive-and-the-intersection-of-information/
I prefer the open source farm, these guys are more practical. A compressed earth brickmaker which can be made for $750 instead of buying it for $25,000, homemade concentrated solar troughs, an open source tractor – these are the sorts of things which can be used worldwide. Nice, down-to-earth, practical.
What do you do if you’re a “seeker” and a “solver”?
I just saw this coming up on Digg:
http://www.cquestrate.com/
They’ve received seed funding from Shell’s GameChanger program, according to this article .
Meryn, that’s a fascinating link. Thanks.
But I didn’t see the Shell thing mentioned. Could you please let me know where to look for that aspect of things? I like to understand what the oil/gas companies are doing with respect to exploring solutions. Thanks.
Cheers for now.
One of my friends who does chemistry has been using this for a few years. There are some big issues with it – basically it is people who can’t afford labs who need something whipped together quickly. There are also issues with idea owership and the scale value of the work, but those can be worked out. Applied science and engineering. A nice idea but not a replacement for real innovation. Chemistry and biochem centric. I’m glad to see foldit was mentioned…
Focusing engineering and science talent on third world problems is a different issue. There is a lot of low hanging fruit and great progress can be made – there are a few glowing success stories.
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But back to science
opening publications is probably more revolutionary
One of the things that really excites me is PLoS (the public library of science) series. Open scientific publication. Some great papers (mostly biology) are being published there. The arXiv is also amazingly cool – and about 20 years old now.