ASEE PRISM - DECEMBER 2008 - FEATURE

rown was pleased to find one that tapped his various interests, including ham radio operation. “It was a difficult problem,” he says, but “I just felt from reading the problem statement that there had to be a way to do this.”

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l Innocentive solvers often worked in disciplines quite removed from the posted problem. And therein lay one key to the company’s success, they found. “Radical innovations often happen at the intersections of disciplines,” wrote Lakhani and Jeppesen in the May 2007 Harvard Business Review. “The more diverse the problem-solving population, the more likely a problem is to be solved.” This finding, and Innocentive’s high rate of success, appears to validate trends in engineering education to both broaden students’ skill sets and to foster collaboration with other disciplines.

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challenge to the secrecy of much scientific research. In Zac Brown’s case, it took only two months to solve the ASSET problem but six more “stressful” months to get his company’s legal department to sign off on his intellectual-property rights, agreeing that the project posed no competitive threat.

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