Science & business boffins: solve companies’ problems for pay. Boost your income update
So shouts the headline in the latest newsletter from MoneySavingExpert.com. It goes on:
Many companies put problems online and offer cash to people who can come up with an effective solution. While not a guaranteed way to grab cash, these can be a fun, interesting, lucrative way to spend your spare time if you’re a business or science boff. Current cash on offer includes £150,000 if you can find a new Travelodge site location and £20,000 for a way to reduce the sugar content of baked goods, but keep them tasty. This and more MoneyMaking tips in the Article: Boost Your Income Forum Section: Up Your Income Also save yourself a fortune: Money Makeover
So can being a ‘boffin’ finally pay?
The page that the newsletter links to has a wide variety of ways to make some cash – from selling your story to a magazine, to recycling your mobile, to participating in medical research.
But the one for boffins is “Solve companies’ problems for pay.”
Basically, it’s open innovation – companies opening up their requirements to an ecosystem of external organisations, working on solutions in partnership, with ideas and requirements flowing in both directions. This contrasts with the traditional ‘top down’ model of in-house R&D, where external interactions is limited to patent/company acquisitions of technologies that the in-house team decides it wants in advance. There’s some analogy there to science communication’s public understanding and dialogue models, but that’s for another post, another time, maybe.
So, if you want to be a money-making, money-saving boffin, give open innovation a try. My favourite of the MoneySavingExpert recommendations is:
Or, for science nerds, silver mining company Barrick is having problems extracting silver from ore at its mines in Argentina. It’s putting up $10 million (£5 million), to whoever can find a cost-effective way to boost production.
There’s something about the MoneySavingExpert presentation of it that I like. Maybe its the reframing of Open Innovation as a frugal cottage industry, the optimism that any ‘boffin’ can solve these problems if they just think about it.
Or maybe it’s the idea that the science nerd can be rich and successful after all…
Last updated:
Saturday, 24 May
2008 - 00:03 UTC
I think this collaborate approach to problems is really interesting, a bit like open source programming but with a pay cheque.
One of my favourite boffin money-making projects is run by the Ansari X prize foundation, a organization that specifically offers cash prizes to drive innovation. I was captivated by the original competition for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space. The $10 million prize was eventually won by the SpaceShipOne team, and their technology has now been adopted by Richard Branson for his Virgin Galactic enterprise.
Grand challenges (like Ansari and Barrick) aren’t the usual forms of open innovation – its more like technology/product/partner trawls like Innocentive or many of the KTNs or organisations like the London Biotechnology Network offer – not so high profile or high reward, but interesting and useful to both parties.
What was intriguing about the DARPA Challenge was the number of university teams taking part – rather than just business/private teams.