Reinventing Discovery_ The New Era of Networked Science - Michael Nielsen [10]
Eight years later, the nonprofit she founded, ASSET India, has opened technology training centers in five Indian cities. They’ve helped hundreds of young people escape the sex trade, and have plans to expand. Unfortunately, many of the smaller towns they’d like to expand into don’t have the reliable electricity needed to power crucial technologies such as the wireless routers used to access the internet. ASSET has experimented with using solar-powered wireless routers, but found that the devices already on the market won’t run reliably over the long hours their training centers are open.
To solve their problem with wireless routers, ASSET tried something unconventional, searching for help using an online marketplace for scientific problems called InnoCentive. InnoCentive is like eBay or Craigslist, but aimed at scientific problems. The idea is that participating organizations can post online “Challenges”—scientific problems they want solved—with prizes for solution, often tens of thousands of dollars. Anyone in the world can download a detailed description of a Challenge, try to solve the problem, and win the prize.
Using $20,000 in prize money put up by the Rockefeller Foundation, ASSET posted an InnoCentive Challenge to design a reliable solar-powered wireless router, using low-cost, easily available hardware and software. In the two months the Challenge was posted at InnoCentive it was downloaded 400 times, and 27 solutions were submitted. The $20,000 prize was awarded to a 31-year-old Texan software engineer named Zacary Brown, and a prototype is being built by engineering students at the University of Arizona.
Zacary Brown wasn’t just any software engineer. An enthusiastic amateur wireless radio operator, he was working toward a goal of making radio contact with every country in the world. While growing up, he was enchanted by his parents’ explanation of how the solar panels Jimmy Carter installed at the White House made electricity from sunlight, and as an adult he was experimenting with using solar panels to power his wireless radio equipment. Over the long run, he hoped to power his entire home office using solar power. In short, Zacary Brown was exactly the right person for ASSET to be talking to. InnoCentive simply provided a way of making the connection.
Underlying InnoCentive is the premise that there is enormous untapped potential for scientific discovery in the world, potential that can be released by connecting the right people. This premise has been confirmed, with more than 160,000 people from 175 countries signing up to InnoCentive, and prizes for more than 200 Challenges awarded. The Challenges range across many areas of science and technology. Examples include finding more cost-effective methods of manufacturing drugs for tuberculosis, designing a solar-powered mosquito repellent (I’m not making this up!) to combat malaria, and finding better ways of identifying people at risk of developing motor neuron disease. Many of the successful solvers report, as Zacary Brown did, that the Challenges they solve closely match their skills and interests. Furthermore, as in the ASSET story, connections are usually made between parties who otherwise would only have met accidentally. InnoCentive makes such connections systematically, not as lucky one-offs, but at scale.
The reason the connections made by InnoCentive are so valuable is, of course, the big gap between the skills of the people posing the Challenges and those solving the Challenges. While designing a solar-powered wireless router may take an expert such as Zacary Brown only a few days, it would take months or years for the people