Seekers tend to turn to Hypios when they want novel solutions. But they need to ensure that the solution meets all of their stated criteria. For problem statements with complex criteria, this can involve a great deal of back-and-forth communications between the Seeker, Hypios and the Solvers.

In consultation with the Seeker, and keeping all active Solvers in the loop, Hypios will occasionally extend the submission deadline on a posted problem. When we do this, the new deadline will be clearly indicated as “extended” (in purple) in the problem list on hypios.com. As a matter of policy, Hypios will never extend a submission deadline more than once for a given problem.

Our goal in establishing these deadline-extension policies is, for Solvers, to give them every reasonable chance of submitting an accurate, elegantly-stated solution that conforms to all requirements and criteria; and for Seekers, to give them every reasonable chance of obtaining a winning solution.

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Hypios: How do you approach open-problem solving? Is the process always the same?

Xavier: The first and most important step in solving any problem is reading it very carefully. Next, you have to mull it over quite a bit: I turn it over two or three times in my mind…

Hypios: And then what?

Xavier: Then I forget about it.  I go for a run, I play squash, or do anything that doesn’t involve thinking about the problem. I need to let whatever unconscious processes there are do their work, and I don’t revisit the problem until I’ve had at least one night’s sleep.  Because of all this, the first hints of a solution always come to me at an unexpected place and time.

Hypios: Where, for instance?

Xavier: Most recently in the shower.

Hypios: But what is it that makes you want to solve problems in the first place?

Xavier: There are a few reasons.  First of all, if you are a creative person, you may find that your immediate surroundings don’t always use your abilities to their full advantage.  But because you are naturally curious and inquisitive, you will seek out whatever challenges you find. The trouble with this is that if you end up doing something interesting or valuable, it usually has little impact on anyone but yourself. This is why I work on Hypios challenges—it gives me the opportunity to be creative and to have an impact.

Hypios: You mean you’d be solving problems even without us?

Xavier: Of course. In fact, when I was a boy in school, my teacher thought I’d become an inventor.  I was always tinkering with appliances and gadgets, trying to improve them.  Being a solver, I think, has come naturally from my interest in improving and tinkering with things.

Hypios: So why use Hypios at all, if you’re constantly solving problems?

Xavier: True, I like to solve problems, but Iet’s be honest. Even if you are super creative, you don’t always get the exposure that you might want, or deserve. When you solve a problem on Hypios, you participate in something bigger than yourself. The problem is not yours. The ideas are not yours: they appear when you face a new kind of situation.  The way you present the solution is not the way you figure it out in your head—it’s carefully worded and polished with the seeker in mind. So there are some ‘aesthetics’ involved in creating something bigger than yourself.  People seem to respect this.  Furthermore, people understand that these are international challenges where you can compete with almost anyone, and the prizes you win tell you exactly how valuable your skills are.  It’s easy to ‘sell’ a solver’s track record to a potential employer.

Hypios: But what if you don’t win?

Xavier: It’s important to remember that if you don’t win, you still retain the intellectual property rights to your solution. Just think: if a seeker is willing to pay a good deal of money for a solution to a problem, it’s likely that another company has a similar problem. You may be able to apply your solution in other, similar fields.  Moreover, if you take out a patent on your solution, it’s very likely to sell well.  Also, solving problems with Hypios has familiarized me with a variety of different industries.  Understanding the milieu where your solution is going to be applied is an important part of my challenge as a solver.  If you are curious about how different industries shape the world, your time spent as a solver will never be wasted on real-life problems.

Hypios: Any final thoughts for us?

Xavier: I suppose I would just want to stress how much a person can learn as a solver.  You can learn so much, and with comparatively little effort on your part.  And you can see just how creative you really are.  If you are creative and enjoy challenging your mind, I think you’ll get a kick out of being a solver.  I’ve really enjoyed seeing my ‘vision’ chosen and adopted by seekers.

Hypios: Thanks so much for this insight. I hope you stay active with us at Hypios.

Xavier: Thank you.  I will.

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Posting problems, challenges, or needs (according to preferred nomenclature) can happen through an intermediary or—if your company is famous enough and can mobilize a lot of resources—through a corporate portal (like RB’s Idealink or P&G’s Connect & Develop). Seems simple enough.

While this describes what often happens in the first experiments with open innovation, it misses out on several important elements in what you can really make happen in Open Problem Solving if the process is well designed.

The main point I want to make here is this: although the desired solution waiting at the end of the process can be tremendously valuable, finding a solution is by no means the only good thing you can get out of it. At every stage of the process, there is value in Open Problem-Solving. With the right approach and mindset, this value can be captured. Even if no solution is retained, investment in Open Problem-Solving can be worthwhile.

In fact, there are even cases in which Open Problem-Solving helps companies find the solution they were looking for, but which still leave value on the table. In other words, there is more in it for you than just a solution.

The first thing to notice is that—contrary to common conception—culture change doesn’t have to happen in the entire company for an experiment in open problem-solving to be valuable. It could happen even within a small division of the company. The rationale for starting with an experiment where a first success-case can be produced is that it’s a way to test the approach. If this case is well documented, it can then be used systematically to spread a culture change in the rest of the organization.

0. Preliminary: Overcoming Solution Fixedness

Being obsessed with solutions only is very common. It took us a while to understand that looking for solutions can be a heuristic to make innovation and problem-solving processes more efficient and satisfactory—not only a means to a solution. The positive results occurred first simply as secondary benefits of customers’ use of hypios. We then thought about how we might systematically capture the value generated along the way: bad process design focuses only on the end of the process rather on making the process itself valuable. In this scenario the process seems to many people to be too long, and the culture change too important, to make companies feel that it justifies their investment—especially if they feel that they risk not getting a solution.

Here are several perks to Open Problem-Solving whether you get a solution or not.

1. Determining how original your internal research actually was

Capturing how many experts looked at your problem and from what fields they came, and correlating this number with the number of actual solutions submitted, will give you an indication of the difficulty of the problem. The experts that offer a solution will provide further indications: because these people are external to your company, they don’t know everything you did or didn’t try in the past.  If they offer only solutions which you have already tried, and know to be inadequate, there are two possible explanations. The most likely case is that problem-description didn’t respect one of the principles for good problem-description: to explain the solution in terms of function and not in terms of realisation. There was probably something to the problem description that limited the potential input by solvers to the kind of solutions you had already tried. If you are sure that this wasn’t the case, you have a very good indication that your R&D team had done a thorough job exploring solutions. If the opposite is true, and you get vast numbers of solutions which had never been tried or even imagined, then your R&D team’s innovation capacity may benefit from a new perspective.

2. Fostering a more open culture in innovation

Raising your employees’ awareness of open problem-solving will help them put Describe and Search (DAS) before Define and Try (DAT)  What does this mean? DAT is the old paradigm of problem solving: using this technique, companies rely only on internal research and development to find solutions. The nature of the problem is, as the name suggests, defined, and then a path is tried in the hopes of fining a solution that works. This is highly inefficient, and likely to generate the same kinds of hypothetical solutions every time DAS is different. It works on the axiom that one of the main impediments to problem-solving is lack of information. But the fact that the needed information is unavailable does not mean that it doesn’t exist. The best way to track it down is to see whether someone, somewhere, has the information and can tell you about it before you try to figure it out yourself. This means going outside the company or environment in which the problem appeared, in other words: overcoming what’s sometimes called the local search bias. When this becomes a habit, a real culture shift occurs.

3.  Learning to look for ideas from outside the box

The general idea behind getting external input is well-known, and is discussed in some detail here. But what does this mean in Open Problem-Solving? Even if no solution is produced, your employees will have interacted with experts from other fields. These experts will have approached your problem with a fresh perspective, without being influenced by old, entrenched habits of thought embedded in your corporate R&D culture. Your researchers will be inspired by the fresh looks of the outsiders: getting such ideas and thinking them through to evaluate them, will help your researchers think of exploring new paths themselves.

4. Using solution approaches to explore new domains

To be specific, you can use the direction where solutions came from as an indicator of where to look for solutions and potential solvers for your problems. Maybe the solution from the paper industry that was suggested by a solver for your food science problem wasn’t right, but the idea that there could be a solution from the paper industry for this kind of problem is probably sound.

5. Learning how best to describe new problems

To look for solutions outside your corporate walls, your employees will need to formulate exactly what the nature of a problem is so that it can be widely understood by potential experts.  But greater clarity for the sake of experts has a favourable internal consequence which is perhaps not immediately obvious: your company will get more insight into these problems. This will lead to more efficient recognition and expression of problems, and coming up with future solutions will be easier. By describing the problem to someone else, who is not within the context of the problem, you will be forced to make it clearer, even if only for yourself.

6.  Broadcasting problems more easily

Even if you don’t find the solution you originally wanted through the first posting, you will actually get a description of the problem that is clear and well written and can be shared both across silos inside the company and with partners outside.

I said before that there is value at every stage of Open Innovation. So it’s also true that each of these three points above can be broken down into other advantages. Every single element, even if isolated, has value. Even if the process of Open Innovation stopped (for instance) at the stage of merely describing the problem, there would still be value. As Einstein famously answered when he was asked what he would do if he had one hour to save the world: I’d spend 55 minutes on understanding the problem and 5 minutes on solving it. Any amount of close reflection on the precise nature of a problem is time well spent. Even the questions that potential solvers will inevitably ask you about your company and its problems will be valuable and possibly also transformative. They will force you to think about issues that only an outsider would be likely to notice. It might even turn out that the problem you thought you had wasn’t the problem in the first place.

If companies only focus on the solution, if they construe this as the only valuable thing that can come from Open Problem-Solving or Open Innovation, they will be disappointed if this solution does not come. Similarly, if a solution is found but discarded, the company will seem to have wasted its time and money. It is better to think of Open Innovation as a process of development or maturation within R&D: a fundamental cultural shift in a company’s approach to thinking about problems.

To focus only on the solution is to miss out on a great deal of value along the way.

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This company understands that Crowdsourcing can be an alternative to database search – “the classic” model within the Describe and Search Paradigm for which I made a case earlier this year. An increasing number of organisations realise the same thing, and use crowdsourcing to shop for existing technologies rather than developping them inhouse or partnering for research and development. This is even the case when companies put heavy emphasis on R&D. Solution search takes different forms, but nearly always involves databases. Marc Duval-Destin, PSA Peugeot’s head of research, recently put it this in context at an Open Innovation conference which I attended: “You need to understand that we make very solid stuff.” This sly comment was directed at the most conservative elements in his industry. “Solid stuff” sounds far removed from the trendier “crowdsourcing” (a term coined by Jeff Howe, contributing editor at Wired magazine), and would seem out of place among best practices recommended by Automotive Manufacturing Solutions Magazine. So much for stereotypes.

The truth is that crowdsourcing, when practiced intelligently, can actually be extremely efficient in both old and new industries. It also offers one main advantage over searching databases: people are creative, but a database isn’t. A person can actually understand that a process he or she has come across in the paper industry, for example, could be used to achieve something in the food industry if the same materials were used for a different purpose. To find this technology, you need to think of the paper-industry first. While a keyword search won’t help you think, the creative engineer you find through intelligent crowdsourcing might. Again, more organisations seem to be getting this point.

To someone who needs a wheel, finding one is as good as inventing one. In fact, it’s even better: a wheel that has been turning for a while is oiled and rounded and can therefore be implemented much faster. So if you know of a wheel, or know of someone who might know of a wheel, or if you know of someone who might know of someone who might know of a wheel, here’s your link: http://www.hypios.com/problems

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Catching on

This video which involves a lone, shirtless dancer who eventually attracts a huge crowd of imitators brilliantly illustrates the importance of the “First Follower”. I’d like however to add a couple of points that seem important to me. I’ll use the examples of Apple and Mp3 to make them:

1. Leading is not always about being first

2. Following is not usually about imitating the leader (as opposed to what the video suggests)

3. Leading can be to invent, but only with a following does invention become innovation

4. Being a good follower can mean to betray the leader’s intention

5. Being a good follower can mean to wait (for the ecosystem to be ready)

Invention and Innovation

Essentially, inventors need someone to believe and trust them if they are to make it from the “lone nut” phase to being a leader. Being smart, creative and charismatic is just something that helps you find people that will follow you. But it won’t take you the whole way from your invention to the moment where it is widely adopted.

Adoption is the hallmark of innovation for most innovation practitioners: they know that mere invention is just the first step. What Sivers explains is closely connected to that articulation of invention and innovation, which arguably is at the center of any innovation management effort: what the inventor needs is followers, a tribe. And a tribe starts with a second person. But what Sivers omits is that in most cases following is not just about imitating. It’s mostly about taking something further, or about doing something different to empower the leader and his idea. Being a good follower sometimes means to do something the leader doesn’t want you to do. Being a good follower sometimes means to betray the one you follow.

Betraying the leader

Consider MP3 technology. The file extension name “mp3” was crowdsourced among employees of the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich in 1995, where most of the technology for the format had been developed. Originally, mp3 decoders were supposed to be cheap and public, and the encoder expensive and with very restricted access. Private users would only have access to decoders, basically mp3 Players. And record companies would have access to encoders and sell the music. This was the noble idea of the development team at Fraunhofer Institute. What happened? Well, while the inventors of the mp3 format were still trying to negotiate a deal with a record-company in Munich, a “follower” from Australia bought and hacked the expensive encoder and released encoding information to the public.

Now, it might seem that the Australian guy wasn’t a follower at all. But I think he was: without his intervention in favour of openness, someone might have made some money, but mp3 wouldn’t have become the no. 1 format for digital music.
Real followers can thus help their leaders succeed in ways they’d rather have avoided. In this case, the invention was lead to “catch on” because a follower opposed the use-scenario that the inventors had intended. The business model for digital music was broken before it even existed. And this remained pretty much the case until Apple came up with a real one: the combination of iPod and iTunes store and thereby – somewhat coincidentally – took a great step to end the humiliating recent history of the record industry.

Innovation in Context

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Within the problem solving aspect of innovation there is a paradigm shift on the horizon.  The old paradigm is DAT (Define and Try).  This refers to the traditional approach of relying on strictly internal research and development solutions, where researchers and engineers quickly define their problem and then try to figure out a solution themselves and with their closer team-members. We think this approach is inherently less efficient than what can be called DAS (Describe and Search). Here’s why:

A typical roadblock for problem solving is lack of information. There are two ways to obtain information: producing it or finding it. That you lack a piece of information doesn’t imply that it doesn’t exist and has to be produced. In most cases, a lack of information is in fact a lack of access. In many cases we’ve assimilated this reality, as when we run a web-search to figure out the answer to a question.

For challenging Research and Development (R&D) problems, it is more difficult to obtain solution-information. However, the fact that it’s harder to find doesn’t mean that nobody has the relevant solution-information and that it’s best for the problem-owner (the person “having” the problem) to go into a resource-consuming information-production mode in order to solve it, for example by conducting experiments in the lab. Given the likely existence of the solution somewhere, this would be grossly inefficient. And yet, it happens a lot all the same.

Systematic patent and publication research is a first step to avoid reinventing the wheel. But the fact that it doesn’t work, doesn’t mean there’s no solution.  In many cases, solutions are, what you could call “embodied” in a strong sense: there is no searchable trace of the solution’s existence (no publications or patents), however somebody knows how to get to the solution relatively fast if only you get your problem in front of them. Finding those people has become much easier  with growth of the social internet.

How do you find the right person to solve your problem?

There are listing-and-community-approaches (broadcasting problems to a large enough community or acquiring lists of experts), solver-and-expert-identification technologies, and mixed approaches that combine advanced solver-and-expert-identification technologies with listings and community building like hypios. These services make it much easier to get your problem in front of the right solver, and as the tools progress, Describe-And-Search (DAS) becomes more and more attractive.

It’s important to understand that we are not talking about replacing all internal (or closed) problem solving by external (or open) problem solving, but about making it part of the standard procedures for all complex R&D challenges to search for existing solutions (inside and outside) and expert Solvers before going into solving mode yourself.

I recently spoke with a rep from a large innovation consulting agency who works a lot with SMEs. He told me that most of the 1500 specialist R&D intensive firms they were working with accepted as a proof of the non-existence of a solution that a large multinational company asks them to develop this solution, i.e. they assume that the large multinational company must have done the solution search before asking them to develop it. But this is wrong. We’ve had several cases where large multinational companies posted problems on hypios and got multiple workable solutions (that had pre-existed) in a matter of months. Why has DAT been predominant (An Error Theory)? So why do many companies still lack a culture of solution search? There are certainly multiple reasons for this. The first reason is that in an environment where research meant closed research, companies didn’t need rigorous ways to distinguish between mildly confidential and non-confidential problems (only what was highly confidential had to be clear). So people are insecure about what problems they can share with potential external solvers (even anonymously). The second reason is probably that finding experts or solutions used to be much more difficult until very recently, especially for non-academic experts, who don’t publish. It’s only recently, that tools like hypios’ have been developed, and make expert-search widely available, quick and efficient. Before deciding to launch the BioMass Challenge, DownEast had worked with different consultants for about two years and had not been able to find a satisfactory solution. For the challenge, hypios’ Solver Surfer technology analyzed several millions of websites, identifying several thousand potential experts, hundreds of which reviewed the problem, which lead to a first round of solutions, ten of which are now under close scrutiny. As the little scheme above shows the rationale for DAT goes down as the tools for Solution Search progress, and the companies that are able to integrate these tools in their innovation processes quickly will find faster, and cheaper ways to innovate. — This article is related to a far more extensive publication entiteled “Overcoming Cognitive and Cultural Resistances in Open Problem-Solving” that is going to be published in A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing (edited by Paul Sloane). If you’d like to know more about expert-identification technologies, get in touch with us at info@hypios.com

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An exciting announcement….

hypios was in the audience during Eric Schmidt’s recent speech in Paris announcing Google’s plans to build a new research center here.  One of the reasons he cited was the opportunity to access the deep pockets of French engineering talent.

We, like others in the Paris tech scene are excited at the prospect–if not exactly surprised.  France is a large market for Google, and 80% of its web searches go through Google.  It makes sense, then, that they’d want to strengthen their presence here.  What makes this announcement so thrilling is the prospect of collateral effects sparked by Google’s investment, e.g. virtuous cricles of investment that, without exaggeration, stand to change the economic geography of the region (silicon allé?).  Who, after all, doubts what a little Google can do?

So far Google has only outlined its plans for the center.  It seems certain that part of the project is to build a European cultural center, or as the Google chief put it: “a hub for technology that promotes the past, present, and future of pan-European culture” and will work towards the “acceleration of the digitalisation of books, documents, magazines, etcetera.”

This areas has been among the politically contentious issues between France/Europe and Google.  The French President’s remarks regarding the plan suggest that Google’s move might help ease some of these concerns by creating  “a more balanced relationship… between Google and the French and European culture industry whose economic models and practices” according to Sarkozy “have been turned upside down by new digital technology.”

A modest proposal

As an integral part of the startup scene in Paris, hypios is looking forward to welcoming its new neighbor.  In the meantime, it would like to throw out a modest proposal for Google’s consideration.

As the recent Progressive X-Prize competition for high fuel-efficiency cars has demonstrated, large scale prizes can be surprisingly efficient start-up incubators.  Imagine now f Google were to sponsor such a large scale prize competition in Europe (it’s already sponsored an XPrize for a lunar lander)?  A prize competition in what area?  Here’s a thought: In expressly the areas that its stated it has the most interest in:

the promotion of the past, present, and future of pan-European culture” at least in part through the “acceleration of the digitalisation of books, documents, magazines, etcetera”

We’ve writting extensively about the positive effects of prize competitions, not least of all being the “leverage effect” the ability of prize competitions to foster investments many times the value of the prize purse.  This scenario is especially likely in exactly those case where the nature of the prize challenge invites a start-up rush, with individuas and teams “over-investing” (beyond their reasonable chances of winning) in the hopes of serving a new market stimulated by the prize competition. This is the market-making power of prize competitions well-documented in a recent McKinsey report.

In addition to the innovations that such a prize competition could source, prize competitions have an additional dimension that Google could certainly benefit from:  positive branding. On a continent that tends to be suspicious of its scale, and market dominance, a contest like this could highlight Google’s open-ness to the European entrepreneurs.

In closing, what we’re suggesting is not simply an idea-generating mechanism (e.g. a Google 10^10, reprise ), but a specific challenge or objective around which the French and European tech community could rally:  for example issues related to addressing the European concerns about Digitizing cultural documents.  Problem definition is critical, but Google would certainly find no lack of willing collaborators.

A healthy dose of immodesty

Ok, so much for the modest proposal:  here’s the immodest part.  hypios is offering its services.  We have experience in designing and running large scale, global prize competitions.  We’re familiar with the strengths and weakness of the European tech scene, have got lots of interesting friends in the startup community… and we have really great cocktail parties (aperos, as the french says)–to which you (and Google) are always invited.

Let us know what you think!

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Today’s  NYTimes has an excellent video and article on the revolution in “desktop manufacturing” via 3-D printers.  Definitely worth viewing.

Of particular interest is their highlight of Bespoke, provider of bespoke (i.e. customized) prosthetic limbs manufactured using novel techniques and a 3-D printer, at a fraction of the price of the traditional production process.

Here’s an excerpt for the article:

At Bespoke, [co-founder Scott] Summit has built a scanning contraption to examine limbs using a camera. After the scan, a detailed image is transmitted to a computer, and Mr. Summit can begin sculpting his limb art.

He uses a 3-D printer to create plastic shells that fit around the prosthetic limbs, and then wraps the shells in any flexible material the customer desires, be it an old bomber jacket or a trusty boot…

Mr. Summit and his partner, Kenneth B. Trauner, the orthopedic surgeon, have built some test models of full legs that have sophisticated features like body symmetry, locking knees and flexing ankles. One artistic design is metal-plated in some areas and leather-wrapped in others.

“It costs $5,000 to $6,000 to print one of these legs, and it has features that aren’t even found in legs that cost $60,000 today,” Mr. Summit said.

“We want the people to have input and pick out their options,” he added. “It’s about going from the Model T to something like a Mini that has 10 million permutations.”

A healthcare devices revolution in the making, you can grasp some of its potential impact when you consider the uses of such tehnology in a place like Haiti, where a large number of post-Earthquake amputees have no access to quality prosthesis.  Indeed, 3-D printing offers a glimpse of a world where all manufacturing is local.

We’ve written quite a bit on this subject before: from fast-track prototyping to 3-D printer bots.  As we’ve said before, it looks like the new Industrial Revolution.  According to the NYTimes, big players like Hewlitt Packard and Google are starting to get in on the action.

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• 3-D Printing Is Spurring a Manufacturing Revolution (nytimes.com)

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