“It took me three evenings to write it up,” an outside solver told the journal Science after he answered Johnson & Johnson’s request for help with a production problem in the manufacture of tuberculosis medication. “I think it’s strange that a major pharma company cannot solve this kind of problem.” Karim Lakhani, codirector of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, had InnoCentive solvers rate problems on how relevant they were to their own field of specialization, and found that “the further the problem was from the solver’s expertise, the more likely they were to solve it.”
