Crowdsourced R&D: Randy Burge Interviews Innocentive Founder Alpheus Bingham on crowdsourcing
The internet is profoundly changing the face of business, and the workings therein, in far-reaching ways that are almost beyond anyone's full comprehension.Such Net effects are often summarized as Web 2.0 to total up the sweeping shifts impacting nearly every corner of life, even something as abstract as corporate R&D. Of course, this people-power emerges out of the complexities of IT software and hardware that makes the Net possible.
Jeff Howe, a contributing editor with Wired magazine, noticed a next generation outsourcing phenomenon emerging from the internet's primordial soup – "the application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software."
Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing" to get his arms around the movement and wrote the introductory article under that name, The Rise of Crowdsourcing, for Wired in June 2006.
Crowdsourcing leverages the powers of the internet to tap expertise and solutions from the "crowd" of global citizens to benefit companies, organizations, communities, and societies-at-large. Howe's work has helped hone its definition and focus.
Innocentive, cofounded by Dr. Alpheus Bingham, a former R&D director at big-pharma Eli Lilly, is one company at the forefront of this crowdsourcing revolution that Howe covered in his article.
The Andover, Mass. company links and manages communications with 120,000 self-selecting crowdsourced innovators around the globe. These contributors submit possible solutions, for possible pay, to key R&D challenges facing Innocentive's R&D customers.
Howe went on to help organize Wired's partnership with Assignment Zero to conduct a first-ever scaled experiment to crowdsource journalism, for an ironic twist, on the crowdsourcing phenom itself.
NMITSA's president, Randy Burge participated in the Assignment Zero crowdsourced journalism project over the past six months with several of his contributions being published on Wired.com.
His interview with Alph Bingham, Crowdsourcing Diversity, was singled out by Howe in his Crowdsourcing blog as one of the best contributions to come from the exercise.
Burge, moonlights as a journalist, writing the Burge Eye View business column for the Albuquerque Tribune. One of his columns, Internet allows us to resource the crowd covered crowdsourcing and Assignment Zero.
