What starts with the crowd ends in research and development
Randy Burge interviews Alpheus Bingham, co-founder of Innocentive, via telephone on May18th
Alpheus Bingham knew something big had to shift in the way invention and innovation happened at pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly. A top R&D executive at Lilly in the mid 1990s, Bingham, along with others, struggled to devise new ways to leverage knowledge to reduce the ridiculously high costs of developing new medicines.
Drug discovery moves at its own expensive glacial pace. Progress is throttled by complex tangles of chemistries, physiologies, mind-sets, regimens, efficacies, budgets, regulators, stockholders, and a thousand other variables. How does a company innovate its innovation?
Bingham scanned the environment for new methods and inspirations to generate more diversity and throughput in Lilly’s R&D idea pool. Creative ferment was high, but the need for change was even higher. How did the Lilly team invent something as radical as crowdsourced R&D in an industry burdened by protocols and status quo?
Lilly, in a bold move, launched e.Lilly to incubate nascent solutions like the one that became Bingham’s crowdsourcing company, Innocentive. But, launching Innocentive was the easy part — could such open-ended crowdsourced potential be integrated into the formal channels of R&D? Dr. Bingham provides some insights and answers to these questions, six years out, for others who are considering the opportunities and perils in employing a crowdsourced workforce.
Innocentive is now adapting its crowdsourcing model to the social philanthropy arena and beyond. It is a story for the innovation ages.
Randy Burge: Wikipedia says that Innocentive emerged, in part, out of a session of the Business Network at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). Did you get the idea for Innocentive while you were at the institute, or was it something you brought to SFI?
Dr. Alpheus Bingham: Innocentive was not "hatched" at the institute. I was involved in some brainstorming sessions on what is transformative about the Internet with some colleagues at Lilly. That was where the actual hatching occurred. Those discussions led us to file the business process patent that was associated with this effort and that is how the two names, Alph Bingham and Aaron Schacht ended up on that patent.
The role of the Santa Fe Institute had actually predated those events. We had been out to SFI and spent some time talking with Bill Miller at Legg Mason, Michael Mauboussin, and Stuart Kauffman. Stuart subsequently did some consulting for the advisory panel for e.Lilly.
As we were refining it, we were back in and out of the institute. Then, as we were launching Innocentive, we had some more sessions with Stuart. We brought our advisers from the incubator at e.Lilly to SFI to keep them informed. There was a lot of co-mingling that went on.
