Crowdsourcing for a Good Cause: How InnoCentive's Utilized an Untapped Pool of Altruism to Work on Non-Profit Challenges

Putting together the donations you want to give for a good cause at this time of the year? Think again about just giving money. How about earning big money why doing good? Just solve one of InnoCentive's challenges for non-profit organizations.

FastCompany, a US business magazine, recently had a very good interview (conducted by Kermit Pattison) with Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of InnoCentive. At InnoCentive, corporations post research problems and a global network of 160,000 solvers takes a crack at solving them for cash rewards. Increasingly, non-profit organizations are beginning to consider crowdsourced 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. Non-profit challenges have grown to about 20 percent of the InnoCentive portfolio, up from virtually none only two years ago.

For Dwayne Spradlin, this is not just is a way to "to tap technical expertise around the world, it also seems to be an untapped pool of altruism". For the solver community, oftentimes participating in a non-profit challenge is the vehicle by which they’re able to contribute (note: while the solutions are used for non-profit causes, prices are real and pay the usual 20-50K for a winning solution). Solvers may not have the financial resources, but they may have the know-how to solve problems that no one else can. That gives them great satisfaction. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Dwayne Spradlin provides an example of Non-Profit Crowdsourcing in the FastCompany interview:

"We ran a challenge for the Oil Spill Recovery Institute out of Cordova, Alaska. They needed to find a new and novel way to get oil of the bottom of Prince William Sound from the Exxon Valdez spill. For 15 years, that oil has been sitting down there at the bottom of the ocean. They could get the oil off the bottom and onto the barges, but the surface temperature drops so dramatically that the oil almost solidifies and they can’t pump it through the barge system.

The solver ended up being an engineer out of the Midwest and he recognized a way to solve that problem using technology that’s fairly common in the construction industry. He recognized that was very similar to the problem of keeping cement liquid when you’re pouring a foundation. They used commercial-grade vibrating equipment on the barges to keep the oil fluid enough so they could process it through the system.

Anyway, the moral of the story is he won $20,000 for solving the challenge and he spent part of that money to fly himself to Cordova, Alaska because he wanted to meet the people from the foundation he was most directly associated with helping. He’s now made himself available to do work for them pro bono on future projects. There’s very little likelihood he would have had an opportunity to use his skills and resources in this philanthropic way without InnoCentive."

How for-profit and not-for-profit challenges differ

Openness: "In the commercial space, we’re not able to be as open. Commercial entities oftentimes are running challenges anonymously. … But in the not-for-profit space, the rules change entirely. It’s much more about openness. It’s much more about trying to drive collaboration and almost a planetary learning to drive something that ultimately benefits humankind in general."

Handling intellectual property:  "In the commercial space, we’re typically transferring intellectual property and trade secrets. In the not-for-profit space, it really is much more about an open source form of licensing and putting into the public domain the learning and outcomes of the challenges."

Success rates: "40 percent of challenges on the network are solved in general. But of the philanthropic challenges, the success rate is closer to 60 percent, as (1) the fundamental desire for people to work on problems that are important to the global good. (2) Not-for-profits in general have not had access to the same kinds of innovation, research and development tools as commercial enterprises. With InnoCentive, these organizations can access to the same kinds of brilliant people around the world on demand that companies have for years."

From crowdsourcing to crowdfunding.

Interestingly, InnoCentive also already thinks of the next big step.

"Imagine challenges to which people can vote and contribute with their donations—prize amounts that grow in relation to public interest. This approach could focus millions of dollars and an extraordinary amount of attention in a way that merges free market activist philanthropy with the power of prizes.

Perhaps 100,000 people could speak with their hearts, minds, and wallets to bring a challenge related to climate change into the forefront more easily than industry or government. We call the idea "crowd-funding meets crowd-sourcing" and could represent the truest form of democratic engagement in the process of innovation. This is an idea we are spending a lot of time developing ..."

Context: Read the entire interview here.