30 October 2009

hypios has posted six external problems to its social problem-solving platform, submitted by the first wave of enterprises that have opted to use the site to resolve complex R&D challenges.

“What you’ve had for so many years now is research silos, both inside and outside corporations,” explains Chief Scientific Officer Simone De Liberato of hypios. “So you have mathematicians work on math problems, chemists on chemistry problems.  This ignores not only the real sources of innovation, which often lie in inter-disciplinarity, but also a long history of successful problem-solving that hinges upon introducing ‘outsiders’ to the problem.”

Using emerging semantic web technologies, including several innovative problem suggestion techniques, hypios aims to transform its network of 100,000+ solvers into a powerful solution engine for the most recalcitrant R&D challenges.

The problems posted on the hypios problem marketplace and broadcast to its network include challenges from the defense and marine sectors, and a problem in sustainable development and design. The awards on offer from the first series of problems total 55,000 USD.
“We are really pleased to launch hypios with this particular set of problems. They offer the sorts of challenges that we think hypios.com is designed to solve,” says Oussama Ammar, president and founder of hypios.  Ammar points to hypios’ ability to enable the transfer of promising techniques and technologies from one sector to another as the key mechanism.  “The challenge, then, becomes effectively broadcasting the problem so it can reach the right set of solvers,” Ammar says.

For each challenge, members of hypios’ solver network are able to access problem specifications, form teams and get updates from solution seekers until the contest deadline.

“We can’t guarantee that a problem will be solved on hypios’ platform, but we do guarantee that certain problems couldn’t be solved without it,” says Klaus-Peter Speidel, hypios’ co-founder and chief communications officer.

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Hypios combines intelligent crowdsourcing, competency discovery technology, and human outreach to deliver an optimal open problem-solving service. “Seekers” post R&D problems to the network and select a deadline and a price for the successful “Solver.” Hypios, which draws from a network of 950,000 experts across the world, has been solving R&D problems for global companies since 2008.

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