Monthly Archives: May 2012

Project Crowdfunding in a University Environment

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One of the many reasons Innovocracy.org partners with Universities is the complex nature of dealing with money in a campus environment. Inventive academic Innovators who need funding to develop a product (often not covered by conventional research grant programs) don’t have all the same options as an inventor working in the private sector. Why is this? Because many of the resources you use were paid for and targeted for research use by grants and other programs unique to university research. They are likely to contain restrictions on how they may be used. Even a student project is often made possible by the environment and resources you can uniquely access on your campus.

In addition to concerns about your legal rights to use university resources, there are intellectual property issues, usually covered by research agreements with the university. (See Innovocracy Director Alex Zapsochny’s recent blog post in intellectual property and Innovocracy) So if you privately go out to an outside funding source, even an innovative one like Kickstarter or Petridish, you may run into issues with your rights regarding the usage of those funds.

A Platform for Collaboration Between the University and the Innovator

Innovocracy has agreements with member universities to help Innovators deal with these restrictions, stay within the rules and stay focused on inventing world-changing innovations. These agreements provide an infrastructure that protects all parties while ensuring that the majority of the funds donated by supporters actually get used for innovation. It’s a groundbreaking process made possible by the unique nature of the Innovocracy platform and the cooperation of the member universities that make up our growing network of innovation in higher education.

Promotional advice for project owners from The Abundant Artist

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My colleague at Innovocracy, Richard Glaser, pointed us to The Abundant Artist, a blog with career advice for artists that has an excellent two part series on using crowdfunding to raise money for projects. While it focuses on the particular requirements of artists like filmmakers, musicians and writers, the overall advice is extremely useful for innovators and researchers too:

Crowdfunding For Artists Part 1

Crowdfunding for Artists Part 2

Crowdfunding at the Grassroots Level in Detroit

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Crowdfunding is a super hot subject these days with the passing of the JOBS Act and everyone talking about Kickstarter and others. But we’re seeing a more grassroots type of crowdfunding spilling over into general philanthropy. Take a look at how a group of young designers in Detroit pooled their resources, put on potluck dinners and then used the proceeds to do a positive Detroit message that group members voted on. There truly is a lot of power in the crowd!

Academic Crowdfunding and Resulting Intellectual Property

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At Innovocracy we have often been asked by innovators interested in our platform what effects, if any, raising money through crowdfunding will have on the intellectual property (IP) rights related to the project for which they are seeking funding.

In the rush to participate in the exciting world of crowdfunding, this may be an underappreciated question.  As with most things related to law, the answer is somewhat context-specific.  However, there are certain mechanisms with academic crowdfunding that can create risks and delays in regard to IP and others that can avoid them.

For instance, if an innovator works with a crowdfunding site where the money raised goes directly to the innovator to further or make possible some project or invention, an argument could in some cases be made that the “research sponsors” have obtained some claim to resulting IP.  Presumably the involved crowdfunding site would have put in place legal terms and conditions applicable to the donors to prevent this kind of claim or misunderstanding, but even that does not mean that a donor may not have a legitimate (at least on its face) legal claim.  At that point many details related to the transaction would need to be examined, possibly by a court of law.

Are the terms and conditions on the website related to the transaction – as well as any other published descriptions of the process – adequate, conspicuous and clear in terms of the donor not having any rights to resulting IP?  Was the donor’s acceptance of those terms (often accomplished when someone clicks a box at the end of a pop-up window) adequate?  Were there any conflicting messages, communications or understandings that might have lead a donor to believe they have rights to IP?  Even if the answers to these questions ultimately favor the innovator, the initial lack of clarity could cause significant delay and expense.

Conversely, by actually working through the internal mechanisms of the university in which the innovator resides and having the funds flow to the university (pursuant to an agreement between the crowdfunding site and the university), this becomes a largely non-existent concern.  Universities have clear and consistent legal agreements with providers of funds about resulting IP, and the necessary language would be present in a mutually signed contract between the university and the crowdfunding site.

There are of course other advantages, beyond clarity of IP rights, to having funds raised through crowdfunding for academic innovation go through the university.  As one of my colleagues at Innovocracy has elaborated on in a recent blog post, the use of research funding within universities is a highly complex area.  Universities are required to put in place complex accounting and compliance systems to make sure funds for particular research and purposes are being accurately used and accounted for.

Funds that are provided to innovators outside of that university infrastructure (which in many universities could not even occur), can create considerable headaches and administrative hassle.

More on that topic in a future post.

Innovocracy Project Promotion On A Shoestring

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Posting an innovation project on Innovocracy is just the beginning. Like that proverbial tree falling in a forest, if nobody is there to hear about it, nothing is likely to happen. As a Project Innovator, it is largely your job to promote the project to those people who are likely to donate funds.
I realize that for many people, self-promotion is anathema. Think of it this way: You’re not promoting yourself, you’re promoting an idea that can change the world, even in a small way. That’s exciting and that’s a story- all you have to do is tell it. The good news is that these days everyone has the tools to do this and they are largely free. It just takes a little effort.

Think In Terms of a Compelling Story

If you’ve posted a Project then you already have the basics of your story. All stories, including business and research stories, have the same characteristics. A beginning, a middle and an end. For an Innovocracy story the beginning is the germination of your idea. Tell us how you came up with it and what motivated you.
The middle is execution. The how, what, why, where, who of getting it built. This is the ‘how I’m going to spend your hard earned money’ part. Tell that story.

Finally, the end is the result you hope to achieve: A product that solves a real problem. End your story with a success story.

Your Target Market

If you’ve already written and posted your Project, use this criteria to evaluate it and make changes if necessary. Remember, when you tell a story, you tailor it to your audience. You have to sit in their shoes, not your own.
Who is your audience? Knowing who is most likely to Support your Project is the key to success. The more targeted you are in your communications, the more likely you are to reach highly motivated potential Supporters. Our first funded project was for a device that would help the families of autistic children with toilet training, a very much real world problem. The Innovator’s audience included:

  • Families and friends of people with autistic children
  • Associations and Groups associated with autism research and support
  • Media that address autism and children’s health issues
  • Local media looking for a ‘feel good’ story
  • More generally, supporters of innovation in their community
  • The campus community including students, faculty, administration and alumni

Your project shares these same types of supporters. Make a list and do a little research. Find associations, blogs, media outlets and campus publicity departments that can tell your story. Write a press release based on your Project posting and the story you’ve created. The basics of writing press releases are covered here.
Then do as many of these things as you can:

  • Start a Facebook Page for your Project. It’s free and only takes a few minutes. Save the URL (web address) of your Facebook Page and use it whenever you tell anyone about your Project. Everything you do will end up there. Facebook Page Set-up Instructions Here. Post your Project Description, press release and Innovocracy Page address on the Page.
  • Ask your Friends to Like your Page and ask them to tell their Friends
  • Post your Project video on YouTube or Vimeo and post a link to the video on Facebook
  • Send (email) your press release to any blogs, news media, associations, etc., on your list. Include a note offering to do interviews. If you get coverage, post links to the coverage on your Facebook Page.
  • If you use Twitter, start telling your followers about the progress of Your Project. Include a shortened URL that points to your Innovocracy page. Make sure your Innovocracy Project Page has a link to your Facebook Project Page.
  • Tell your Connections on LinkedIn about your Project. Look for LinkedIn Groups that would be interested in your story, join them and tell the story.

You get the idea. Create a compelling story and then keep passing it along to others who are likely to respond to it. And make yourself available 24/7 to talk about it. Nothing sells like real enthusiasm!

Abundance, Cognitive Surplus and the Democratization of Innovation

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I’m currently reading Abundance, The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. Diamandis is the founder of The X Prize Foundation that seeks to reward innovation on a grand scale by offering large cash prizes for breakthroughs on large scale, difficult tech problems like cheap spaceflight. The book is a must read for anyone interested in technology and innovation because it convincingly argues that we are on the cusp of a much more abundant world due to advances in communications and exponential technology, technology that multiplies itself.

Reading this book while working on explaining what Innovocracy is about has been serendipitous. Though Diamandis’ Foundation focuses on big problems with big solutions, the books is about scalable solutions to fundamental problems like getting clean water to people. One example they offer is NYU Professor Clay Shirky’s observations on a resource he calls cognitive surplus. In Shirky’s words: “Wikipedia took one hundred million hours of volunteer time to create. How do we measure this relative to other uses of time? Well, TV watching, which is the largest use of time, takes two hundred billion hours every year- in the US alone. To put this in perspective, we spend a Wikipedia worth of time every weekend in the US watching advertisements alone. If we were to forego our television addiction for just one year the world would have over a trillion hours of cognitive surplus to commit to share projects.” They go on to note: “Imagine what we could do for the world’s grand challenges with a trillion hours of focused attention?”

This got me thinking about Innovocracy and the network effect. We’re building a network to take a cognitive and financial surplus and route some of it to supporting innovation in our research institutions. Though we are in a pre-launch beta mode, we have signed up several universities as Launch Members of Innovocracy. Their communities of students, faculty, administration, parents, alumni and other associated populations easily total millions of individuals. Each time we add another college or university that number grows exponentially. And the number of potential Innovators and Supporters also grows exponentially.

This exponential growth is what we refer to when we talk about a goal of democratizing innovation. The Innovocracy Network has the potential to generate millions of dollars of support for innovation, even if that support comes in tiny amounts.

It gets even more interesting when you add in communities of interest. One of our first posted projects is for a technology that solves a significant problem for parents and those who work with autism, toilet training (click the link to support this important project). This project also links Innovocracy to a large and involved constituency outside of academia: The autism community. Because Innovocracy encourages support from anyone interested in a project we can tap into an even larger universe of resources.

This kind of potential is what drives those of us working to make Innovocracy a success.

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This post was originally published in early-March and has been reposted because of changing blogging platforms. 

The Genesis of Innovocracy

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I have always been fascinated by how technologies are often first developed in academic institutions and then make their way to transform our daily lives.  This is the path that many ground breaking technologies from the Internet to life saving medications have traveled.  It is possibility one of the greatest assets that any developed country can hope to harness.

Until I started working with many great academic institutions, I didn’t realize how with such regularity innovations are unable to change our lives. Mostly because they languish unattended due to lack of funding needed to transition them to actual prototypes and products.  One of the most common challenges faced by academic innovators is that typical funding sources do not support the development of prototyping and product creation.

As we know from countless examples, great innovations such as the computer mouse and graphical user interface would never have blossomed if practical approaches to prototyping had not been pursued.  This is equivalently true for medical devices and alternative energy applications. Over the years, I have worked with many great researchers on individual projects in arthritis, cancer, and cardiac conditions to help these technologies become products and services. While the work has been rewarding, there has always been the frustration that so many other life changing innovations could be coming out of academic institutions if only there were more avenues to help academics fund prototypes.  Most of the time, all it would take is a fairly modest amount of money to help create that functional prototype to get the process moving.

My experiences led to the creation of Innovocracy.  Our collective aspiration is to become the go-to-platform for academic-based innovators who are out to change the world and people’s lives for the better. We currently have three institutions signed up as launch partners and are entering a closed alpha with the University of Rochester.  Additionally, we are in conversations with a number of other great academic institutions.

So far we are delighted by the positive reaction from the academic community and are excited to bridge them with the community of people interested in helping change the world for the better through sponsoring innovation.  We will be attending the annual Association of Technology Managers conference on March 14th and 15th in Anaheim, CA as we continue to roll out the platform and expand its functionality. 

This post was originally published in mid-February and has been reposted because of changing blogging platforms.