Just learned of InnoCentive, cool freelance projects, not strictly programming. (opens in new tab)

All of the projects make me sigh with wonder and fill me with desire to dust off the secret biochemical lab that I have in my basement.

My wife and I submitted a proposal for an Innocentive challenge sponsored by the local science museum a while back. The task was to design the next great traveling exhibit for science museums, and we had fun writing our proposal. A few months later we received an email announcing the names of the winning teams, and that's all - no details on the winning proposals, no feedback on our submission. I understand that they can't give everyone customized feedback, but I was still left feeling like I got absolutely nothing from the experience - I have no idea what parts of my proposal needed improvement, no idea how to make my next proposal better. For a different kind of challenge (say I found a successful way to "convert lactic acid to acrylic acid" but my solution still wasn't chosen), I'd probably be angry about the lack of transparency. So yeah, that was probably the first and last time I'll try to solve one of their challenges.

Wikinomics talks about Innocentive, saying at the time there were "ninety thousand scientists from 175 countries" registered there, and that "firms will build their R&D organizations around a core of question askers and outsource most of the problem solving" Actually, I think they mention Innocentive over two dozen times in the book and how it was supposed to revolutionize the world. Meh. There is the book on Amazon if you haven't seen it: http://amzn.com/1591843677?itag=nowarlab-20&linkCode=as2

The blurb says they have "thousands" of challenges, but the actual list contains twenty-four. And who owns the winning solution? The solver, or whichever $BIGMULTINATIONAL just paid chump change for something that will earn them billions?