In a recent email to the university, President Faust invited the Harvard Community to participate in the “Harvard Catalyst & InnoCentive Prize for Innovation.” This experiment in crowdsourcing seeks to bring the Harvard community together to propose new questions and suggest new answers related to Type 1 diabetes. As the website states:
“This challenge is an exercise in tapping the knowledge of the widest possible community and encouraging the formation of new teams and new forms of collaboration around a specific topic area,” said Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Eva Guinan, MD, director of the Harvard Catalyst Linkages program and the other collaboration leader. “Type 1 diabetes is a good example of a disease that has touched many people at Harvard and elsewhere personally and professionally. As a result, they may have questions or ideas that could help spawn new collaborations and areas for research.”
Traditionally, researchers balance the need to collaborate, the need to “build on the past,” against the need for individuals to have authorship and ownership. And typically this collaboration is contained within any given discipline. This experiment is exciting because it pushes the boundaries of this collaborative exchange, opening up doors to all sorts of thinkers, from scientists in other fields, to non-scientists, to students from all backgrounds and education levels. With any problem in society, a constant stream of fresh ideas is necessary to keep the solution-finding process creative and innovative. The diversity of thoughts and experiences of the many different contributors in a crowdsourcing environment allows a constant rethinking of problems. Social scientists call this the “spill over” effect. It’s one of the key drivers of innovation.
While this experiment seems to be promising for scientific research, crowdsourcing would likely be beneficial to other areas as well, especially in public policy matters. It is not exactly easy for our ideas on health care or civil rights reform to be heard by politicians. There is a constant stream of interests groups (with far more money) competing for the ears of Congressmen. Congress and the president should seriously consider finding ways to open their doors to the ideas of the masses. The Obama Administration has made many efforts to get the general public more involved in government. At change.org, the general populace can submit “innovative ideas for addressing challenges our country faces.” Visitors to the website can vote for their favorite ideas, and the top ten will be presented to the Obama Administration at the end of the year. This website seems to be a great portal, but a quick glance at the 2009 winners reveals the problem. Winning ideas included “Legalize Marijuana,” “Health Freedom IS our first Freedom,” and “Pass Marriage Equality for LGBT Couples Nationwide.” None of these ideas is particularly new, and no one in the government seemed to care about these winners as the results were barely mentioned by the media. Quite obviously, political ideas are political by nature.
Crowdsourcing must be more than a long discussion or a veiled political campaign. It must be focused on innovating and populated by serious people. Harvard’s experiment is seems promising — or, at least, more promising than Obama’s. Only time will tell.
Photo: Flickr stream of gaspi