In the spirit of Innocentive

This article on the NYTimes discusses Innocentive, a great site I discovered a year ago that gives regular people the opportunity to solve problems for big business for a reward. The article touched briefly on the potential for someone to think of a solution but patent or demand more money for it. While they note that this case hasn't occurred yet, I have seen challenges on the site that seemed to warrant it.

The idea behind Innocentive is that companies post specific problems they are encountering that their engineers are unable to solve, a problem with a step in a manufacturing process for instance. Some however, have posted challenges that amount to fishing for the next great advance in technology, and aren't offering what would seem to be fair compensation for it. One example was seeking a new super absorbent polymer (SAP) that could absorb and retain liquid within the defined parameters, etc. It didn't state it directly, but it was clear from the requirements that it was to be used for diapers and related products. I believe the offer was $20,000, which while not insignificant, seemed like a small price to pay for what could be an industry changing advance.

While I think the spirit of Innocentive is really about solving small problems within the context of something larger that the company has already engineered, I'm not against companies seeking bigger ideas, I just think the reward should be comparable to the value of what they're asking. The Netflix DVD rental service depends heavily on a movie recommendation system they developed to keep customers coming back. They are offering $1 million for a system that can generate better recommendations than their current one. Unlike the Innocentive challenge above, such a price acknowledges the value of what they're asking for and shows respect to their prospective solvers.