Yesterday I heard a good story on crowd sourcing on NPR radio, Businesses Harness Power of the Crowd. It covered the basics and focused Innocentive which describes itself as “web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe.”

Innocentive’s model allows companies and individuals with research problems to pose challenges and offer financial rewards ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 for acceptable solutions. Individual scientists or research organizations can register to work on a challenge and in doing so, accept the challenge proposer’s which outlines the review period for solutions, confidentiality, and intellectual property transfer for winning solutions. It currently is centered on chemistry and the life sciences but has plans to expand to other disciplines.

Related posts:

1. Three tech giants to finance research
2. Yahoo! to Expand Scope of Yahoo! Research Labs
3. Wisdom of the crowd control?
4. Jiawei Han: Research Challenges In Data Mining, 10am 4/22 LH8 UMBC
5. Nabil Adam on Emergency Management Research Challenges, 10am Tue Nov 11 @ UMBC