Gimmick or a Good Idea?

Barrack Obama referred to John McCain's Battery Contest as another gimmick designed to continue America’s dependence on oil, “But in this campaign, John McCain offering the same old gimmicks that will provide almost no short-term relief to folks who are struggling with high gas prices; gimmicks that will only increase our oil addiction for another four years.”

McCain proposed that the government offers a $300 million prize for whoever invents a battery compact enough, powerful enough and cheap enough to replace fossil fuels.

However according to a recent New York Times article, McCain's idea is not a gimmick nor is it new. One company involved in this approach is InnoCentive, a company that links organizations with problems (challenges) to people all over the world (solvers) who win cash prizes for resolving them.

The idea of offering prizes for scientific achievements is hardly new. “It has been around for centuries,” said Karim R. Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied InnoCentive. One early example was the work of John Harrison, the 18th-century clockmaker who, in response to a prize offered by the British Parliament, solved the problem of determining longitude at sea by inventing a clock that would keep good time even in heavy weather.

But, Dr. Lakhani said, “most laboratories, most R & D endeavors still work on the premise ‘we can accumulate and make sense of all the knowledge that is relevant.’ The open-source models and a model like InnoCentive show that other approaches can help.”

Dwayne Spradlin, president and chief executive of InnoCentive, said in an interview that the company had solved 250 challenges, for prizes typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. According to the Web site (www.innocentive.com), the achievements include a compound for skin tanning, a method of preventing snack chip breakage and a mini-extruder in brick-making.

“Odds are one or more products in your home has been innovated in our network,” Mr. Spradlin said. “Procter & Gamble has products that were innovated on the InnoCentive network.”

One recent example is John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Ill., who knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t set up before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid. Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks from freezing. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute of Cordova, Alaska, paid him $20,000 for his idea. The chemist and the institute came together through InnoCentive.

Dwayne Spradlin, president and chief executive of InnoCentive, said in an interview that the company had solved 250 challenges, for prizes typically in the $10,000 to $25,000 range. According to the Web site (www.innocentive.com), the achievements include a compound for skin tanning, a method of preventing snack chip breakage and a mini-extruder in brick-making.

“Odds are one or more products in your home has been innovated in our network,” Mr. Spradlin said. “Procter & Gamble has products that were innovated on the InnoCentive network.”

The company says solvers come from 175 countries. More than a third have doctorates, Mr. Spradlin said, and while motivated by money, they also have a desire to solve “problems that matter.”

Surely, Mr. Obama will agree that finding an alternative to fossil fuels is a problem that matters.

The full text of the Times article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/22inno.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Innocentive&st=cse&oref=slogin