EAGER Germination: From 0 to 2

The University of Wisconsin proposes to build a prototype for an online, open Crowdsourcing Innovation Platform to develop roadmaps for the solution of pressing societal issues through articulation of long-term goals and germination of transformative research ideas and questions. A diverse group of doctoral students and postdocs will participate in a year-long workshop course, further developing their skills gained in a Summer Institute, learning about how the U.S. sets research priorities, and developing an innovative environment. In this environment, problem definition and rapid prototyping alternate, and groups of researchers and stakeholders constructively critique approaches. The platform will be a ?living network? that links ideas and people in a dynamic way to keep people intellectually and socially engaged. Through the process, a complex problem will continue to be divided into smaller sub-problems until they are amenable to solutions.

The next generation (the 'millennials') has already embraced that the future of scientific research will need to be more open, accessible, and democratic and that solutions to the pressing societal issues will come from making many small contributions to big projects collaboratively. This pilot project tests the hypothesis that crowdsourcing pressing societal problems to the global research community and stakeholders (i) meshes well with the value system of the next generation of researchers; (ii) lets us look at the problems simultaneously from different angles, and thus, in essence, increases the number of potential pathways to solutions, and (iii) increases the willingness to take risks and pursue novel research paths as large, complex problems are subdivided into smaller, more manageable problems by a group connected within a social network. If successful, it will provide a novel way to find solutions to the pressing societal problems of today's society. Additionally, through jointly exploring problem posing, the teams will gain confidence and the skills to tackle complex problems and uncover barriers to collaborating on complex, interdisciplinary problems that are of national and international importance. The potential for scalability and the transferability of this approach into other domains could contribute to a long-term change in how the research community interacts with itself and stakeholders to build pathways to solutions that respect social and behavioral constraints.