“I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he says. After eight weekends in his lab, he sent in a solution, and before long a $20,000 check arrived. Belov still has no idea who asked the question, nor even what the substance is for.
Welcome to the new face of industrial research. Scientists have long suspected that solutions to myriad problems were somewhere out there– scattered among research labs and even kitchens the world over–if only they could figure out how to find them. Two years ago pharmaceutical maker Eli Lilly took a stab and formed InnoCentive, an online forum. Soon Dow Chemical and Procter & Gamble joined in. Now eight more companies have posted problems that have stumped their own experts on www.innocentive.com. More than 20,000 “solvers” have offered answers. “What blew our minds is that solutions can come from the most unobvious people,” says P&G research manager Larry Huston. One lab had given up on making a certain compound, only to find a chemist in Kazakhstan who had it in a jar in his refrigerator. Says Dow research head Rick Gross: “I think they’re on to something.”
InnoCentive’s Web site is creating a sort of free-agent system of experts around the world. “It’s Web-based competitive outsourcing,” says Raghunath Mashelkar, director general of India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. InnoCentive’s six scientists help clients frame questions and screen the solutions. To avoid tipping off rivals, all postings are anonymous. The secrecy also gives solvers an unbiased shot at a little glory. Submissions are geography blind, and job titles are irrelevant. Most companies would never have hired 28-year-old grad student Michael Cash at the University of Georgia to find an efficient way to make a compound similar to tryptophan. “I instantly had an idea how to go about it,” says Cash, who solved the problem in two weeks.
Big firms like the arrangement because it shifts all the risk onto the researchers, who don’t get paid unless they produce results. Even then, they often can’t keep the money. Cash gave half his $30,000 award to his university and another quarter to his professor, leaving him enough left to pay off credit-card debt. He did better than Apparao Satyam, who clocked in 20-hour days for three weeks, only to have his employer, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, take his entire $75,000 award. “Now I’m not motivated to solve any of [InnoCentive’s] problems,” Satyam gripes. Winners must relinquish all intellectual-property rights to their discoveries, leaving them to wonder which kind of fortune they helped secure for their mystery seeker.
Despite such drawbacks, plenty of challengers are willing to tackle the 80 questions currently on the site. The cash prizes–from $5,000 to $100,000–can go far in places like Russia, where top chemists earn $300 a month. “All [your] financial problems can be solved [with] a big award,” says Anatoly Rusanov, vice president of the Mendeleev Russian Chemical Society. One Polish scientist won $75,000–twice. But it’s not just about money. “The problems are very interesting,” says Valery Lunin, head of physical chemistry at Moscow State University, who’s planning to set up a similar site for Russian companies. Says Belov: “It’s the intellectual challenge of being able to solve a problem that nobody could before. It’s not easy to quit.” That’s the kind of addiction InnoCentive and its clients are betting on.
