Alph Bingham

Co-founder, InnoCentive; Open Innovation Expert

BIG IDEAS

• The Power of Open Innovation
  In an increasingly competitive global marketplace, companies, academic institutions, and non-profit organizations are hungry for breakthrough innovations. Alph Bingham’s experience in R&D strategic planning and more than 25 years with Eli Lilly Company led him to realize a new approach for organizations to harness human intellect and facilitate R&D organizational structures. Alph co-founded InnoCentive, a platform that leverages the internet as a collaborative tool, where companies can tap into the vast pool of potential knowledge outside its walls to improve and speed R&D efforts. Alph speaks passionately about the value of reaching outside the core circle of internal resources to solve complex, previously unsolvable challenges. There are many academicians who have written knowledgeably on the topic but Alph is both a designer and a practitioner. With countless success stories, Alph illustrates how connecting scientists and organizations – across disciplines and across the globe – allows for new levels of open and networked innovation.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Dr. Alph Bingham is a pioneer in the field of open innovation and an advocate of collaborative approaches to research and development.  He is co-founder, and former president and chief executive officer of InnoCentive Inc., a Web-based community that matches companies facing R&D challenges with scientists who propose solutions.  Through InnoCentive, a platform that leverages the ability to connect to a whole planet of people through the Internet, organizations can access individuals – problem solvers – who might never have been found.

Alph spent more than 25 years with Eli Lilly and Company, and offers deep experience in pharmaceutical research and development, research acquisitions and collaborations, and R&D strategic planning. During his career he was instrumental in creating and developing Eli Lilly's portfolio management process as well as establishing the divisions of Research Acquisitions, the Office of Alliance Management and e.Lilly, a business innovation unit, from which various other ventures that create the advantages of open and networked organizational structures, including: InnoCentive, YourEncore, Inc., Coalesix, Inc., Maaguzi, Inc., Indigo Biosystems, Seriosity, Chorus and Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.

He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Fast Track Systems, Inc., and Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.; the advisory boards of the Center for Collective Intelligence (MIT), the Business Innovation Factory, Phase Forward, Inc., YourEncore, Inc. and Coalesix, Inc. and as a member of the board of trustees of the Bankinter Foundation in Madrid.

He has lectured extensively at both national and international events and serves as a Visiting Scholar at the National Center for Supercomputing Application at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is also the former chairman of the Board of Editors of the Research Technology Management Journal. Dr. Bingham was the recipient of the Economist's Fourth Annual Innovation Summit "Business Process Award" for InnoCentive. He was also named as one of Project Management Institute's "Power 50" leaders in October 2005.

Dr. Bingham received a B.S. in chemistry from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford University.

A Closer Look at Alph

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Alph's current research agenda?

1) Better understanding the meta-data of a system like InnoCentive to help decode how and why it works and how to improve on it.  And, 2) helping to build "verticals" that are better designed from the ground up to utilize something as radical as a network in place of traditional R&D.

ENGAGEMENTS
How have other organizations utilized Alph's expertise, and what's ahead on his schedule?

In his own words…

"Other industries are looking to see how the learnings of open innovation apply to them. As I help provide the extrapolation from pharma, many have become customers of InnoCentive and many others have looked for ways in which they can practice a greater degree of openness than they have done historically. I most recently keynoted a conference in Berkeley on the future of healthcare and I will be speaking to a group of engineers and leading an executive management session right after the first of the year. I have also been engaged as a consultant where companies are looking for ways to spin out expertise and better define the "inside" and "outside" of their R&D operations."

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Who shapes Alph's thinking and inspires his work?

Direct Business:  Peter Drucker, Jim March at Stanford, and Ronald Coase's work on the theory of the firm

Indirect Business:  Kevin Kelly, Stu Kauffman, James Scott (Seeing Like a State)

RECOMMENDED READING
What's on Alph's must-read list?

Jim March's books The Dynamics of Rules and The Pursuit of Organizational Intelligence; Time Falling Bodies Take to Light by William Irwin Thompson. Re-reads include Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, and the collected works of James Thurber (we all need a good laugh).

"I'd also read my grandson's comic book, "Death Jr." and one of the FIVE Horsemen had broken off to go it alone; "Bureaucracy" was the fifth horsemen in this tale.  He was readying the world for the Bureaucalypse and I really should find out how this story ends."

MIND FUEL
Which blogs, web sites, and industry events does Alph tap into to feed his mind and fuel his creativity?

Alph generally grabs the news and current events off the web using a host of news servers.

Periodically he checks in to the cluetrain manifesto page (http://www.cluetrain.com>) and reread the theses to either get grounded or test for continued relevance.

When researching new ideas he starts with Google or Wikipedia but quickly "free associate" (via hyperlink jumping) into many places he has never been.  Alph feels it is absolutely critical to always inject an element of randomness in searching for knowledge.