A student many years ago turned me on to Innocentive which is a crowd sourced problem solving effort that has real potential for all of you at some point in your life. Here is the link to the home page....
Here is your assignment:
Explore the site and learn how solvers are involved in the process. Write me a description of how you understand the process of crowd sourced problem solving at Innocentive works.
Then take a look at the current and past challenges ( Challenges link ) in some category of interest to you. This may well be the Engineering/Design category but there are loads of others. I want you to explicitly look at the time between posting the challenge and the submission date, the award amount, the types of challenges, and the number of teams working on solutions. I am asking you to do a rough sort of data analysis as you look at these different challenges.
You are also looking for a challenge that is interesting to you whether it is completed (under evaluation) or not. You will notice that open challenges require you to set up an account to be able to see the details of the challenge while challenges under evaluation typically will share most of the challenge details more easily.
Answer the following questions:
What is a typical time between posting the challenge and submission date?
What are the different types of challenges and what are the expectations for each (FAQs)?
What is the range of typical awards?
What is a typical number of teams that worked on a proposal (is this the same as the number who submitted a solution?)? Be careful to look at recently posted challenges as well as challenges under evaluation.
What is one challenge that was interesting to you and why?
I've always thought it would be fun to have an Innocentive SWAT team at COCC that works on challenges of interest throughout the year. We did this once 15 years ago and we were a finalist for one challenge but then they changed the criteria and our solution couldn't adapt to the new criteria.
