Sidebar: Innovation Sourcing at Air Products

Computerworld - Air Products and Chemicals Inc., which recently signed up with innovation brokers InnoCentive Inc. and NineSigma Inc., says it's too soon to have seen results. But Miles Drake, vice president and chief technology officer at the Allentown, Pa., company, says it has been reaching outside for innovation for some time, especially to Russia, where there are about 3,000 scientific institutes accessible through Air Products' innovation network.
"The connectivity of everyone across the globe has been growing exponentially," Drake says. "That means you can find information, you can find people, people can find you, and at essentially zero cost."
And as access has grown, so has the pool of scientists on which to draw. Says Drake, "Thirty years ago, a large chemical company like Dow or Du Pont could have a significant fraction of the world's top talent in certain fields. Today, no company can do that."
Air Products uses its own internal search engines and network tools, says John Tao, corporate director for technology partnerships. These include a database of the 3,000 Russian scientific institutes, with enough information on each to know what searchers are likely to find there.
There's also an internal "experience database" that company researchers can use to find out who among Air Products employees knows what. And employees are encouraged to use a front end to the various innovation discovery applications, called Idea Tracker, which enables them to post ideas for new products or process improvements.
Finally, Air Products has an Emerging Technology Identification Group that continually scours individual Web sites, conference proceedings, sales brochures, company reports and other literature not formally published. There is a system to publish the results internally to people who have subscribed based on their specified interests, Tao says.