<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Check out this link </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">http://www.innocentive.com</font>
<table border align=center>
<tr valign=top>
<td bgcolor=white><font size=3 color=#5f5f5f><b>InnoCentiveŽ is an exciting
web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges
facing leading companies from around the globe. We provide a powerful online
forum enabling major companies to reward scientific innovation through
financial incentives</b></font></table>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">And here's the article that brought
it to my attention.<br>
Robin</font>
<form action=http://global.factiva.com/ha/default.aspx method=post>
<br>
<br>
<br><font size=3>UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT</font>
<br><font size=3>Money and Business/Financial Desk; SECT3</font>
<br><font size=3><b>Here's an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas</b> </font>
<br><font size=3>By WILLIAM C. TAYLOR </font>
<br><font size=3>1367 words</font>
<br><font size=3>26 March 2006</font>
<br><a href=javascript:void(0)><font size=3 color=blue>The New York Times</font></a>
<br><font size=3>Late Edition - Final</font>
<br><font size=3>3</font>
<br><font size=3>English</font>
<br><font size=3>Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company. All Rights
Reserved.</font>
<p><font size=3>LIKE many top executives, James R. Lavoie and Joseph M.
Marino keep a close eye on the stock market. But the two men, co-founders
of Rite-Solutions, a software company that builds advanced -- and highly
classified -- command-and-control systems for the Navy, don't worry much
about Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange. </font>
<p><font size=3>Instead, they focus on an internal market where any employee
can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business
or make an efficiency improvement. These proposals become stocks, complete
with ticker symbols, discussion lists and e-mail alerts. Employees buy
or sell the stocks, and prices change to reflect the sentiments of the
company's engineers, computer scientists and project managers -- as well
as its marketers, accountants and even the receptionist. </font>
<p><font size=3>''We're the founders, but we're far from the smartest people
here,'' Mr. Lavoie, the chief executive, said during an interview at Rite-Solutions'
headquarters outside Newport, R.I. ''At most companies, especially technology
companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than
senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius.''
</font>
<p><font size=3>That's a refreshing dose of humility from a successful
C.E.O. with decades of experience in his field. (Mr. Lavoie, 59, is a Vietnam
War veteran and an accomplished engineer who has devoted his career to
military-oriented technologies.) </font>
<p><font size=3>Most companies operate under the assumption that big ideas
come from a few big brains: the inspired founder, the eccentric inventor,
the visionary boss. But there's a fine line between individual genius and
know-it-all arrogance. What happens when rivals become so numerous, when
technologies move so quickly, that no corporate honcho can think of everything?
Then it's time to invent a less top-down approach to innovation, to make
it everybody's business to come up with great ideas. </font>
<p><font size=3>That's a key lesson behind the rise of open source technology,
most notably Linux. A ragtag army of programmers organized into groups,
wrote computer code, made the code available for anyone to revise and,
by competing and cooperating in a global community, reshaped the market
for software. The brilliance of Linux as a model of innovation is that
it is powered by the grass-roots brilliance of the thousands of programmers
who created it. </font>
<p><font size=3>According to Tim O'Reilly, the founder and chief executive
of O'Reilly Media, the computer book publisher, and an evangelist for open
source technologies, creativity is no longer about which companies have
the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling ''architecture
of participation.'' That is, which companies make it easy, interesting
and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems
and improve products? </font>
<p><font size=3>At Rite-Solutions, the architecture of participation is
both businesslike and playful. Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's
internal market, which is called Mutual Fun. Each stock comes with a detailed
description -- called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus -- and begins
trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in ''opinion money''
to allocate among the offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm
by investing in a stock and, better yet, volunteering to work on the project.
Volunteers share in the proceeds, in the form of real money, if the stock
becomes a product or delivers savings. </font>
<p><font size=3>Mr. Marino, 57, president of Rite-Solutions, says the market,
which began in January 2005, has already paid big dividends. One of the
earliest stocks (ticker symbol: VIEW) was a proposal to apply three-dimensional
visualization technology, akin to video games, to help sailors and domestic-security
personnel practice making decisions in emergency situations. Initially,
Mr. Marino was unenthusiastic about the idea -- ''I'm not a joystick jockey''
-- but support among employees was overwhelming. Today, that product line,
called Rite-View, accounts for 30 percent of total sales. </font>
<p><font size=3>''Would this have happened if it were just up to the guys
at the top?'' Mr. Marino asked. ''Absolutely not. But we could not ignore
the fact that so many people were rallying around the idea. This system
removes the terrible burden of us always having to be right.'' </font>
<p><font size=3>Another virtue of the stock market, Mr. Lavoie added, is
that it finds good ideas from unlikely sources. Among Rite-Solutions' core
technologies are pattern-recognition algorithms used in military applications,
as well as for electronic gambling systems at casinos, a big market for
the company. A member of the administrative staff, with no technical expertise,
thought that this technology might also be used in educational settings,
to create an entertaining way for students to learn history or math. </font>
<p><font size=3>She started a stock called Win/Play/Learn (symbol: WPL),
which attracted a rush of investment from engineers eager to turn her idea
into a product. Their enthusiasm led to meetings with Hasbro, up the road
in Pawtucket, and Rite-Solutions won a contract to help it build its VuGo
multimedia system, introduced last Christmas. </font>
<p><font size=3>Mr. Lavoie called this innovation an example of the ''quiet
genius'' that goes untapped inside most organizations. ''We would have
never connected those dots,'' he said. ''But one employee floated an idea,
lots of employees got passionate about it and that led to a new line of
business.'' </font>
<p><font size=3>The next frontier is to tap the quiet genius that exists
outside organizations -- to attract innovations from people who are prepared
to work with a company, even if they don't work for it. An intriguing case
in point is InnoCentive, a virtual research and development lab through
which major corporations invite scientists and engineers worldwide to contribute
ideas and solve problems they haven't been able to crack themselves. </font>
<p><font size=3>InnoCentive, based in Andover, Mass., is literally a marketplace
of ideas. It has signed up more than 30 blue-chip companies, including
Procter & Gamble, Boeing and DuPont, whose research labs are groaning
under the weight of unsolved problems and unfinished projects. It has also
signed up more than 90,000 biologists, chemists and other professionals
from more than 175 countries. These ''solvers'' compete to meet thorny
technical challenges posted by ''seeker'' companies. Each challenge has
a detailed scientific description, a deadline and an award, which can run
as high as $100,000. </font>
<p><font size=3>''We are talking about the democratization of science,''
said Alpheus Bingham, who spent 28 years as a scientist and senior research
executive at Eli Lilly & Company before becoming the president and
chief executive of InnoCentive. ''What happens when you open your company
to thousands and thousands of minds, each of them with a totally different
set of life experiences?'' </font>
<p><font size=3>InnoCentive, founded as an independent start-up by Lilly
in 2001, has an impressive record. It can point to a long list of valuable
scientific ideas that have arrived, with surprising speed, from faraway
places. In addition to the United States, the top countries for solvers
are China, India and Russia. </font>
<p><font size=3>Last month, InnoCentive attracted a $9 million infusion
of venture capital to accelerate its growth. ''There is a 'collective mind'
out there,'' Dr. Bingham said. ''The question for companies is, what fraction
of it can you access?'' </font>
<p><font size=3>That remains an unanswered question at many companies,
whose leaders continue to rely on their own brainpower as the key source
of ideas. But there's evidence that more and more top executives are recognizing
the limits of their individual genius. </font>
<p><font size=3>Back at Rite-Solutions, for example, one of the most valuable
stocks on Mutual Fun is the stock market itself (symbol: STK). So many
executives from other companies have asked to study the system that a team
championed the idea of licensing it as a product -- another unexpected
opportunity. </font>
<p><font size=3>''There's nothing wrong with experience,'' said Mr. Marino,
the company's president. ''The problem is when experience gets in the way
of innovation. As founders, the one thing we know is that we don't know
all the answers.'' </font>
<p><font size=3>Drawing (Drawing by James Yang) </font>
<p><font size=3>William C. Taylor is a co-founder and founding editor of
Fast Company magazine. He lives in Wellesley, Mass.</font>
<p></form>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif"><br>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br>
Robin Lougee-Heimer<br>
IBM TJ Watson Research Center<br>
1101 Kitchawan Road, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598<br>
ph: 914-945-3032 fax: 914-945-3434 <br>
robinlh@us.ibm.com<br>
http://www.coin-or.org<br>
<br>
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