Speaker Bio

Prize incentives bring distinctive benefits to both the seekers and providers of innovation solutions. Dr. Bingham will speak on how true diversity, which is a critical component of these innovation modes, is often disabled by typical modes of Open Collaboration. There is a “long tail” to innovation and an art to tapping it from any and all sources. Dr. Alpheus 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 were launched 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 InnoCentive, Inc., and Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.; the advisory boards of the Center for Collective Intelligence (MIT), the Business Innovation Factory, Ideate, 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 Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford University.