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Vish Abhyankar & CrowdSourcing - There from the Beginning!
Fascinating story from Vish Abhyankar, (MedTechIQ member). Recently, CIMIT (Center for Integrating Medicine & Innovative Technology) had a panel discussion in Boston on the use of "Social Networking" to facilitate medical innovation & e-consultation. The panel included InnoCentive, The Big Idea Group & Dr Julian Goldman (MedTechIQ member). I quickly learned that Vish has been there from the beginning. Read on:
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Hi CC
I saw your note on "Crowdsourcing" that gave me chuckles and laugh. Let me tell the background for my chuckles because it may illuminate the process of idea formation and how long it takes for the innovation to become visible to mainstream folks.
I am going back to around 1991-92-time period. At that time I was serving on the technical advisory board of the “Super-Computing Center” at the University of Illinois, Urbana campus. As a point of reference, among other things, we had funded a project called ‘Mosaic” which eventually became the foundation for all the existing Web-browsers. Of course the word ‘web-browser’ was yet to be invented then.
Anyway, in my conversations with my fellow board members from Eli Lilly and Caterpillar, the most talked about topic was: Why most of the old-line companies have a dry pipeline of new ideas and innovations in spite of spending Billions of dollars on R&D every year.
While listening to the presentation on Mosaic project, an idea came to my mind. What-if we use this worldwide-web idea and Mosaic type of software to bring together the corporations with R&D problems & money and worldwide talented young people who may have or could come up with solutions?
During the next coffee break, I mentioned my idea to the fellow board members. Subsequently we talked about some more and some of us developed it to the level of details to make it operationally feasible. Of course, we had a tough time describing our thinking to each other because the needed lexicon was not yet invented.
From those early days, many aspects of the core idea have been deployed successfully. And now it is great to see that the old idea is on its way to becoming a mainstream idea.
I learned a lot from this experience. Who knows may be one day; two of us will have time to chat about it.
Vish.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi CC
I saw your note on "Crowdsourcing" that gave me chuckles and laugh. Let me tell the background for my chuckles because it may illuminate the process of idea formation and how long it takes for the innovation to become visible to mainstream folks.
I am going back to around 1991-92-time period. At that time I was serving on the technical advisory board of the “Super-Computing Center” at the University of Illinois, Urbana campus. As a point of reference, among other things, we had funded a project called ‘Mosaic” which eventually became the foundation for all the existing Web-browsers. Of course the word ‘web-browser’ was yet to be invented then.
Anyway, in my conversations with my fellow board members from Eli Lilly and Caterpillar, the most talked about topic was: Why most of the old-line companies have a dry pipeline of new ideas and innovations in spite of spending Billions of dollars on R&D every year.
While listening to the presentation on Mosaic project, an idea came to my mind. What-if we use this worldwide-web idea and Mosaic type of software to bring together the corporations with R&D problems & money and worldwide talented young people who may have or could come up with solutions?
During the next coffee break, I mentioned my idea to the fellow board members. Subsequently we talked about some more and some of us developed it to the level of details to make it operationally feasible. Of course, we had a tough time describing our thinking to each other because the needed lexicon was not yet invented.
From those early days, many aspects of the core idea have been deployed successfully. And now it is great to see that the old idea is on its way to becoming a mainstream idea.
I learned a lot from this experience. Who knows may be one day; two of us will have time to chat about it.
Vish.
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