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Last week Transparency Life Sciences launched as the world’s first drug development company that is based on Open Innovation. Crowdsourcing.org takes a look at Open Innovation in the scientific community to see how this could work in the world of medicine.
BountyIt isn't just another crowdsourcing site--the "bounty" model encourages collaboration and competition, while allowing for unique control of how bounties are distributed.
Crowdfunding is used to raise money for all sorts of projects, from the weird to the wonderful. This week, a couple used crowdfunding to bring new life into the world. The IndieGoGo Baby project (in which a Florida-based couple raised money for IVF treatment) brought to mind a case last year when a couple from Minneapolis sought the help of an online crowd to decide whether to abort their baby or not. Here’s a closer look at both of these baby stories.
With flu season in full swing many parts of the world, the folks at Sickweather hit on just the right time to launch their new website, which uses the crowdsourcing model to track the dreaded flu infection. The Sickweather team hopes that users will use this new software as a way to avoid catching flu this winter. We took a look at this new website to see what it’s all about.
Sickweather LLC, based in Baltimore, was co-founded and launched by three guys who grew up together in that area. They built the website as a way of getting a “perspective on when sickness bubbles up, where it travels and how it affects our lives.”
With crowdfunding becoming an ever more popular way to raise start up costs for businesses and projects all over the world, Crowdsourcing.org decided to take a look at ten cases where crowdfunding has been put to a benevolent use.
The rise in the number of people online — not just in the developed world, but in poorer countries too — is transforming the world into a truly “global village.” As a result, those who have internet access have more opportunities than ever. Perhaps the most fitting example to kick off our look at philanthropic instances of crowdfunding is AHumanRight.org, a non-government organization whose mission is to ensure “global access to information as a human right.” The charitable group employed the crowdfunding method in an attempt to buy the high capacity communications satellite Terrestar 1 from its bankrupt owners. AHumanRight.org planned to provide internet access to some of the poorest people on the planet, free of charge.
Crowdfunding, the latest way for start-ups to raise capital in order to launch their products/services, has enjoyed quite a bit of attention recently. Instead of looking for angels and investors to plough large sums of money into their businesses (and be eligible for a return when the company has future liquidity events or IPOs), many would-be entrepreneurs are taking the crowdfunding route. This makes great sense in many ways, one of the most important being that the company founder(s) maintain total control over the business, allowing them to adhere closely to their original ideas and visions.
I first came across the concept of crowdfunding a couple of years ago when I discovered Kickstarter and watched a short video made by the guys who were trying to launch the social network Diaspora, a viable alternative to Facebook that allows users to maintain full ownership of their content. I was so impressed by the enthusiasm of the group and the initiative shown by these really young guys (and the fact that I have children of a similar age) that I donated to the project. This made me wonder what makes other people donate to crowdfunded projects.
This week’s news that researchers at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland are publishing their results “so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes” represents a huge leap forward for Open Science.
The science community is traditionally a “closed” community, probably at the insistence of the large pharmaceutical organizations who insist on this as a method of protecting the intellectual property rights on any research they fund. While there have been moves within the science community to share research online as a means of “crowdsourcing” the work and speeding up discovery, science seems to be way behind other disciplines in actually getting the information out there.
While it makes perfect sense to many researchers to open up research projects for collaboration, the companies that sponsor and fund research laboratories worldwide are keen to keep the lid on research results and new developments due to the immense amounts of money to be made from new drugs, medical procedures and technological/industrial applications.
High speed science - will it save lives?
Amid concern that the Peer Review process may hold back speedy solutions, and with little financial incentive to improve drugs to make them more effective, Open Science projects are springing up all over the web. Here’s the lowdown on some of the problems and solutions facing experimental lab research and some of the innovative projects that are emerging as a result.
Matthew Todd, an organic chemist from the University of Sydney’s School of Chemistry used a Google Tech Talk as a platform to preach the spirit of openness that is part of the Google ethos in the hope that this openness can be widely adopted by the scientific community.
Founded in 2010, the industry website, Crowdsourcing.org, is a neutral organization dedicated solely to crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As one of the most influential and credible authorities in the crowdsourcing space, Crowdsourcing.org is recognized worldwide for its intellectual capital, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding practice expertise and unbiased thought leadership.
