MIT Solve 2024–2025 Annual Report

 95 Open innovation challenges received 26,000+ solutions submitted from 180 countries, addressing global issues from decarbonizing supply chains to improving rare disease care.

Read the report-info.solve.mit.edu/hubfs/MIT Solve - Annual Report 2025.pdf?\

Solve 2022 Impact report

 

Solve is on a mission to drive innovation to solve world challenges. As an initiative of MIT, Solve uses open innovation challenges to find the most promising tech-based social entrepreneurs from all around the world. With the support of our community, including nearly 100 organizations that span industries and sectors, we provide funding and resources to help innovators scale and drive lasting impact.

Download the report:  https://info.solve.mit.edu/hubfs/Solve%202022%20Impact%20Report%20(2).pdf?

UNICEF launches Open Innovation Portal

CauseTech is a private sector initiative in partnership with UNICEF Innovation Center. 

Innovators are invited to register and offer ideas to solve global challenges like Health, water, Energy listed there.

Some of the technologies that have the potential to address these challenges are illustrated in Tech Inspirations. 

• The EcoloBlue product line of Atmospheric Water Generators (AWGs) creates sustainable, unlimited pure drinking water from humidity in the air. 
• New Cycloclean is a bicycle water purification system that can be operated without an engine or a battery. New Cycloclean is driven by pedaling the bicycle to operate the water purifying equipment attached to the bicycle.
• The cigar-sized plastic tool, LifeStraw delivers the most basic needs and purifies water from potential pathogens like typhoid, cholera, dysentery and diarrhea

Through CauseTech's ideation platform, powered by IdeaScale, users can post their ideas, comment, and vote. Members can post an entirely new idea or technology, or simply improve upon the incredible work that UNICEF is already doing. 

'Innovation without Research': Concept for comments

Framework of concept paper given below for comments. This deals with technological innovations.

a)    Corporate R&D started weaning away researchers from universities by offering better facilities and freedom. In-house research centers blossomed with hundreds of highly qualified and competent scientists and researchers working in frontier areas of Science &Technology. During the boom period returns on investment in R&D  was not an issue, firms spent a percentage of their turnover benchmarking the spend with industry average.

b)    Despite large budget and acclaimed outcome, many a time firm noticed they could not compete with fast moving players. Categorization into small r, capital D followed, proving space for catch up work. It is expected that capital D projects, smal duration projects aimed at bettering competition would derive strength from capital R work. The pool of competences developed with capital R projects could be harvested for both capital R and capital D projects, where the firm is the industry leader but also for capital D projects benchmarking competitors product in the market place, with faster response. Portfolio of R & D projects, all marshaled with internal resources was in order for many years.

c)    Sponsored research was always an integral part , researchers generally continued working with alumni institute. Strategic alliances was an acknowledgement of limitation of doing everything in-house and complex strategies evolved for managing strategic alliance with shadow teams, IP sharing , market segmentation etc. acquisition of start-ups for their IP was more smoother operation.

d)    Open innovation and crowd sourcing  was a disruptive practice, firms looked at the vast pool of global talent and shifted focus from ownership to access. The complexity of innovation challenges and multiple teams accepting those challenges call for redefining the contours of global stock of knowledge.

e)    Globalization had seen relative decline in competitiveness of OECD nations and most analysts agree the only way these nations can continue to save jobs is to invest in R&D. With the result, we had seen larger number of talented people working on commercial research than ever before in human history.

f)     The pipeline taking research to market bellowed at the research end leading to a jump in global stock of knowledge. Considering the large ownership base, it can be said this stock of knowledge is publicly owned. This worked wonders for crowd sourcing of ideas, innovation challenges.

g)    And this also provides an unique opportunity for catching up economies like India to improve their innovation score without proportionate increase in national R&D budget. India , a poor nation more on R&D than Australia, Finland etc. Historically , most of spending was by government for scientific and research projects. Whereas, the industry garnered market and developed technological competences based on imported technology. Thus there was a significant disconnect between government funded research institutes and commercial firms. Globalization and IT widened  the rift to disconnect of minds. Collapse of joint ventures ended the inexhaustible source of competitive technology with most technology suppliers setting up their own Indian operations. New generation entrepreneurs smelled better success in IT enable services and largest number of engineers today work in IT firms rather than assembly lines. The  so called Indian human resource strength ends  with students graduation , still Indian government continues to increase their budgets for research by government funded institutes, calling industry to take the fruits of that public spend.

h)    India is a large country needing jobs in all categories and there is revival of interest in manufacturing mainly due to market demand and IT players are looking for value addition beyond labour arbitrage.

Hypothesis 1

Indian government can get better returns by funding proposals in capital D category based on globally sourced capital R.

Hypothesis 2

India firms need to practice and learn to use Open innovation Platforms. 

Mahindra Rise contest generates many sparks

The first round is now open for voting and I can see many sparks flying around. Money matters - as the saying goes , you through peanuts and you attract only monkeys. This contest   gives away Rs 292 lakhs as awards, the lowest is Rs 4 lakhs and highest Rs 40 lakhs. 


We can say innovation competitions in India have come of age. Ignite your spark at :http://www.sparktherise.com/

Open Innovation challenges on Innoget

David Rafols is the CEO and co-founder of Innoget with a wealth of experience on innovation management and R&D projects. Prior to founding Innoget, he was a technology sourcing manager at CIDEM, an Innovation Agency within the Catalonia local government, Barcelona, Spain. David has also worked for several food industry companies, such as Chupa Chups S.A. (technical manager) and Danone S.A. (R&D engineer). He has a degree in Biology and an MBA for the University of Barcelona. Some challenges :
A Hungarian technology transfer agency is looking for a manufacturer of the named medical instrument that is equipped with an image recording device and uses illumination with different wavelength.The instrument is capable of recording skin lesions, and of helping the uses in the diagnosing process. The system consists of two parts. These are the scanning device, and the docking station.

The scanning device contains an image recording device (camera or photodevice), which is used to take pictures of the inspected skin surface. It also contains LED-s with different wavelength, to illuminate the surface (an additional option is to attach polarizing filters). To get the appropriate sized images, a custom parameterized lens is built into the device.

The recorded image is automatically transferred to an external system (PC or PDA). The communication is made via a wired (USB, ETHERNET) and/or wireless (WiFi) channel. 

The internal electronics are the image recording device (already available), the LED circle, and a controlling circuit (custom circuit). This controls the LED-s, switches the system on or off and triggers the camera. All the circuits are made of SMD components. The case has an ergonomic design. There is one push button and a LED indicator on it. With these two things the user can easily operate the instrument. The other part, the docking station has a charging circuit inside, hence if we do not use the scanning device, the dock charges it continuously (with custom circuit). The device operates with a rechargeable accumulator. Built-in LCD hardware is an extra option for a quick diagnosis.

During the design phase, the main objective was, to design it clearly, in order to assist the manufacturing stage. All the custom built components were designed with CAD softwares. If a component is already available, then obtainability, and ease of inclusion into the system were taken into account. In the design stage, facilitating the manufacturing process is also very important. During the design stage a range of common standards were incorporated.  

Input documents and files for manufacturing:

The company can provide AutoCAD 2010 (.dwg) design files for case and docking station design, Eagle 5.7.0 schematics and layout design files for custom electronics. The program codes for PIC MCU are written in the latest Microchip MPLAB. We can provide the project files and the .c, .asm source codes. They will provide detailed description of necessary, already available components (for example image recording device).

Innovation Tournments by Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich

DST- P&G Challenge of the month `Innovative Whitening Technologies superior to Hydroquinone' ushered in `Open Innovation' into India and going by the experience of innovation leaders , one can predict this Juggernaut would not stop. Innovation Tournaments by Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich , Professors at The Wharton School provides a practical guide in tapping the global brains.

Do you believe that Innovation process can be standardized- then read this. The authors narrate processes to pull innovation opportunities from strategy, select innovation projects by taking into account both estimated profits and investment needs, creating a balanced pipeline with different time horizons, designing filters for ideas, deploying financial models and creating organisational structure. More over the software  Darwinator and other resources listed in the book are free to download on registration.

Open Planet ideas: idea sourcing by Sony with WWF

The competition is in the Concepting stage - there are 215 concepts to refine.

Holst Centre - an independent open-innovation R&D centre

Holst Centre is an independent open-innovation R&D centre that develops generic technologies for Wireless Autonomous Sensor Technologies and Flexible Electronics. Holst Centre was set up in 2005 by imec (Flanders, Belgium) and TNO (The Netherlands) with support from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Government of Flanders. It is named after Gilles Holst, a Dutch pioneer in Research and Development and first director of Philips Research.

Holst Centre offers students opportunities for Master Thesis internships for 6 months. See the topics for these internships.

ideaken

ideaken is an open innovation and co-creation platform promoted by Jayesh Badani. See the demo at: http://www.ideaken.com/pages/49/demo.html

Xerox India Innovation Hub

Xerox takes Open Innovation route to increase cooperation with Indian researchers. Research activities at the India Innovation Hub have two core focus areas. The first of these aims at exploring and developing innovative document management solutions for emerging markets by bringing Xerox’s world-class expertise in imaging, smart document management, linguistics, and ethnography to address locally relevant problems. Projects under this theme range from modeling and analysis of document supply chains, multilingual technologies, mobile applications, and rural technology initiatives.
An equally important focus is on leveraging the latest technologies and paradigms, such as cloud and web computing, human computation, social networks and computational economics, to advance innovation in solutions and services delivery for Xerox’s global markets. Projects under this theme include on-line market places for services, mobile workflows and applications for enterprises, social network modeling for targeted information and cloud-based document solutions.
The India Innovation Hub is located at the Olympia Technology Park in Chennai, India.
Contact Details:
XeroxIndiaInnovationHub@xerox.com
http://www.xerox.com/innovation

Wagon R Smart Idea competition

Wagon R Smart Idea competition received 337 ideas. View and vote for the best.
URL:http://www.wagonrsmartideas.com/index.php?option=com_members&Itemid=27
Last date 25th December

Idea Bounty

Idea Bounty is a social think tank that provides a secure channel for the world wide creative community to offer solutions to creative briefs. A reward or 'Bounty' is offered for the Idea that best answers the brief and the contributor of the Winning Idea gets the cash.

Patent Lens

Patent Lens is a worldwide, open-access, free full-text patent informatics resource. It serves as the cyberinfrastructure platform for the Initiative for Open Innovation. Some interesting features:

Search technology now independent of language; Chinese (中文) PCTs now fully text-searchable. Search for lapsed, abandoned or expired US Patents. Visualize Patent Families with new graphical trees as PDFs. Patent Landscapes on Influenza Genes, Rice Genome and Adjuvants now online. Protein & DNA Sequence searching of over 77 million sequences from worldwide patent collections.

This initiative is from Cambia, founded by Richard Jefforson, Molecular Biologist at FAO.

Digital Open competition for youth

Digital Open is an online community and competition for global youth below 17 years. Submit proposal at http://digitalopen.org/home

Open Innnovation invitation: Rapid and accurate Analysis of Alignment and Arthritis Grading from Digital Radiographs of Lower Limbs and Knees

Current imaging systems are limited by lack of precision. The imprecision relates to how the images are obtained (positional errors) and imaging errors (due to parallax and distortion). The level of imprecision before surgery for Joint Replacement makes the choice of implants to fit the arthritic joint unreliable. One consequence of this is the major accumulation of implant inventories in the Operating Room (OR). Another may be less than desirable implant match and a poorer functional result.

TePP on behalf of OASYS invites proposals from Indian innovators to develop software that acquires images of limb geometry, join size and arthritis grading in an automated way.

TePP RPI 2-HDVSL based printing stack

TePP on behalf of a start-up invites proposals from innovators to Develop a low cost HDVSL based printing stack. The selected Innovator will be licensed HDVSL stack. Initially a printing shop or lab version or enterprise version should be made to avoid tooling cost. Once perfected, the technology can be taken to make really compact printers which can be carried in laptop bags and battery powered.

Innovators interested in developing this application based on a disruptive technology may write giving details of their relevant capabilities, action plan, budget ,time frame etc. For technical

details on HDVSL stack, contact

shm.cheekotel@gmail.com, shm.cheekotel@gmail.com