How Open Innovation is Helping to Fight Climate Change

There has been a lot of talk across the globe about the looming climate change crisis we are facing. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has weighed in on the issues, warning that new urgency is required in order to combat the effects that climate change is having on the planet. An increasing number of environmental scientists are raising the alarm, which is why businesses and organizations are looking for new ways to create cleaner, greener energy, products and ways of doing business.

The trouble is that innovation, at least in the traditional sense, is a slow-moving process. It can take years for even the most seasoned minds to create new technology in order to solve complex environmental issues that organizations and people all over the world face. Thankfully, open innovation is stepping in and filling the void left behind by traditional innovation methodologies.

How Open Innovation is Helping the Cause

Climate change is a global issue that will take a global conglomeration of specialties to tackle and solve. Innovative minds from all over the world will need to come together in order to build technology and find solutions to environmental challenges. Open innovation provides this marketplace of ideas. The open innovation marketplace brings together specialists in dozens of different areas, allowing them to come together to solve challenges presented by governments, public organizations and companies within the energy sector.

InnoCentive is Already Working with Such Organizations

InnoCentive partners with public sector organizations and private entities like Enel to solve environmental issues that threaten people all over the world. By combining Enel’s Open Innovability model, which allows anyone around the world to propose sustainable innovation projects or solutions, with InnoCentive’s Challenge-Driven InnovationTM (CDI) methodology, which formulates innovation projects into well-defined Challenges, our organizations have leveraged a global crowd of more than 400,000 brilliant minds with 10’s of millions of minds coming to InnoCentive  monthly to find solutions to over 20 Challenges that include:

• • Maximizing Sunlight Reflection of the Ground Surface in Solar Plants
  • Recycling and Reusing Wind Turbine Blades
  • Creating New Methods for Cooling Water and Water Disinfection

Bringing Solutions to Public Entities

InnoCentive also connects the global crowd with public sector organizations and governmental agencies to crowdsource solutions to their environmental issues. Recently, InnoCentive has wrapped up two challenges with the Bureau of Reclamation (US Department of the Interior) that provided solutions for:

• Predicting dangerous weather (Sub-Seasonal Climate Forcast Radio)
• Monitoring pathogens in local water supplies (Pathogen Monitoring Stage 1)

Join InnoCentive and Its Partners in the Fight Against Climate Change

No single organization can tackle the global issue of climate change alone, but the open innovation marketplace is the only place where fast, affordable and reliable innovation on this scale can take place. If you are an organization or government entity that has environmental issues that need to be solved, contact InnoCentive to begin leveraging the global crowd.