Crowdsourcing for Life Sciences

Should your organization be using Internet NG features to harness the collective wisdom of the global village?

Knowledge-intensive enterprises have begun to adopt these techniques, sometimes called crowdsourcing, to tackle their R&D challenges.

An opportunity to speak about NG concepts at the Wisconsin Biotechnology & Medical Device Association annual conference introduced me to InnoCentive, a spin-off of pharma giant Eli Lily, which offers the Open Innovation Marketplace to unite "seekers" of solutions and "solvers" of problems in the life sciences and other disciplines.

InnoCentive has expanded its reach through the Rockefeller Foundation-InnoCentive Partnership, which underwrites InnoCentive's services to those "addressing the needs of poor or vulnerable people to access the same cutting-edge resource to innovate as Fortune 500 companies."

Related approaches are offered by Cambia and its BIOS initiative and Science Commons, two non-profits striving to foster collective innovation by offering tools and communities for open source collaboration, data exchange, and intellectual property licensing.