How often do you do the V-8 forehead smack, thinking, “I could have done that! I thought of that ages ago but figured nobody would listen.”? If you are the kind of innovator who can figure out answers to our world’s problems, whether that is over beers with friends at 4AM or in a workshop or while meditating on a mountain, don’t let what you perceive as a lack of access to decision makers stop you. Innocentive is crowd-sourcing creative solutions and asking all of us, via “challenge-driven innovation,” to share those ideas and truly make a difference. Their focus is to bridge the gap between great ideas and actual solutions, so just because you don’t know how to create the prototype for your world-changing widget doesn’t mean we don’t need it. Get the idea or vision out there so others can make it manifest with their expertise.
More than 1,200 challenges have been posted online, and more than 250,000 solvers from more than 200 countries have weighed in with ideas, theories, and solutions. Be one of them. Solvers who actually figure out the conundrum, whether it be eliminating potholes in Boston’s streets or creating an elastic polymer for skin applications (actual challenges), are paid for their innovations—from $5,000 to a cool million, based on the complexity of the problem. Many of the challenges are highly scientific, but not all, with additional categories in public health, global good, and nature, you don’t have to have a sting of letters after your name to bring us all forward with your dream of progress. Jump in and look around, see if you can kick our society in the pants and move us ahead. We need you thinking on this.
Change by Doing 