BIF-2 Summit: Alph Bingham
Alph Bingham is talking about Globalization 3.0: Globalization of the individual. When he headed west to graduate school, he packed up all his belongings and hit the road. When he arrived, they asked him to skin poisonous frogs. They had to figure out why it was yellow, so he and his colleagues were taking pigment out, taking toxins out, and nothing really added up. He felt like Edison: “I now know 1000 ways NOT to make a light bulb.”
Somewhere between sitting down and hitting his chair, the answer hit him… it was more of a Eureka incident rather than a slow discovery. That led to the question of, how do you organize a research business? For too long, we’ve followed the Edison model (perspiration-based approach). So Alph and his colleagued asked if you could organize for Archimedes?
They looked at the Internet, and decided to put the problems in front of everyone, in hopes of producing Archimedes-like events more frequently. The result was InnoCentive. They took challenges from Fortune 500 companies and posted them online (like the old west wanted posters). The net result has been that one-third of the posted problems have been solved. He calls the company a Medici-attractor.