{"id":1522,"date":"2011-08-01T17:05:35","date_gmt":"2011-08-01T23:05:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/workingknowledge.com\/blog\/?p=1522"},"modified":"2023-03-02T21:27:41","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T03:27:41","slug":"frugal-innovation-at-nasa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.workingknowledge.com\/blog\/frugal-innovation-at-nasa\/","title":{"rendered":"Frugal Innovation at NASA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Point<\/strong>:\u00a0 Budget constraints demand frugal innovation.<\/p>\n

Story<\/strong>:\u00a0 In 2005, NASA\u2019s Constellation program \u2013 tasked with designing a way to get humans to the moon and eventually to Mars \u2013 suffered a 45% reduction in R&D budgets during the process of getting Constellation running.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWe knew those resources weren\u2019t coming back,” said Jeff Davis, Director of the Space Life Sciences Directorate at NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center. \u201cWe thought to ourselves, we can\u2019t get this done just doing 45% less. We need to approach this whole program in a new way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davis\u2019 team looked for new ways to work and began exploring alliances and external innovation platforms. The team hit upon the idea of using open innovation challenges at about the same time that President Obama\u2019s Open Government Initiative encouraged public participation and the Office of Management and Budget issued guidelines on using prizes to spur public participation to solve innovation challenges.<\/p>\n

Using the InnoCentive<\/a> platform, Davis\u2019 team issued an open innovation challenge entitled, \u201cData Driven Forecasting of Solar Events,\u201d seeking solutions for how to predict particle storms that would pose a hazard to the Constellation spacecraft above the earth\u2019s atmosphere. An engineer from rural New Hampshire provided the winning solution. White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra described the results:<\/p>\n

\u201cI share with you the results of NASA\u2019s early experience with Innocentive\u2019s scientific expert network platform, a platform of 200,000 scientists, where NASA said it would pose a few difficult scientific challenges.\u00a0 One of the challenges was, \u2018how can we forecast solar activity to better predict when to release our rockets into space?\u2019\u201d This was a vexing problem that NASA had been grappling with for more than 30 years.\u00a0 By putting the challenge out to the public, a semi-retired radio frequency engineer living in rural New Hampshire had the opportunity to share his idea on how to address the problem. [All the engineer needed] was a simple Internet connection.\u00a0 No complicated RFP, the need for a lobbyist, some convoluted process \u2013 just a smart person in our country who could help solve a difficult scientific challenge and was paid a modest $30,000 for that insight.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Action<\/strong>:<\/p>\n