#27 Jen Beardsley and Taylor Gilliland – Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation

Cool Collaborations

It’s #27 and I’m joined by two guests for this episode. Jen Beardsley is the Prize Competitions Program Administrator for the United States Bureau of Reclamation and Taylor Gilliland is the Senior Advisor for Innovation Programs at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. For this episode we are again talking about crowdsourcing, but this time from the perspective of two people who routinely use crowdsourcing methods to solve problems inside their own agencies. We talk about how crowdsourcing and open innovation methods have been used to advance the work in invasive species, protective masks, and pipeline leaks, before exploring how agencies could consider these types of approaches in their own work.

Please enjoy my conversation with Jen and Taylor.

Some links to some of the things we discuss during this episode:

• Bureau of Reclamation
• Prize Competitions, Research and Development Office, Bureau of Reclamation
• C. Taylor Gilliland
• National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB)
• National Institutes of Health
• Check out U.S. Government Crowdsource challenges at Challenge.gov
• Book: Where do Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson

Your host for the Cool Collaborations podcast is Scott Millar. Scott is the principle of Collaboration Dynamics, where he often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together.