Thinkable relaunches to mobilise & fund research via competitions
Our mission at Thinkable is to accelerate innovation by building a new way for the world to engage, cultivate & fund science. We’ve been super busy this year, so it’s time to give our community an update!
The Story So Far…
In August 2014, we launched subscription-based crowd-funding tools that allowed scientists to share and grow sponsors (sort of like Patreon.com, but for science). Over a few months we were able to raise nearly $15,000 for some heart disease & ocean researchers. But we listened to many people & organisations who wanted something very different to the traditional crowd-funding model:
- Science societies, governments & universities already have large pools of research awards, but had no tools & incentives to reward their scientists to reach-out & engage their ideas to a broader audience. This engagement is critical to drive wider knowledge uptake, accelerate collaboration or cultivate support from industry or the public.
- We also heard from groups of people who had already raised pools of donations for research but had no easy, open, transparent way to source, engage & fund the best research to drive impact for their chosen cause. Many people didn’t want to fund seemingly sporadic individual research projects on traditional crowd-funding platforms. What they wanted was to drive 100% of their donation to the highest quality innovation projects from a pool of top scientists in areas important to them. That way their donations could be targeted, transparent, innovative and impactful for them.
Competitions were born
We then took many months to develop and launch Thinkable competitions to allow organisations and individuals to cultivate, showcase & award science that is important to them. To test our model, we put up a $5000 prize pool in early 2015 to launch the first ever open research competition called the Thinkable Open Innovation Award.
We didn’t know what to expect but were overwhelmed by the quality of entries, engagement & collaboration generated. Nearly 400,000 people have viewed the 47 entries from 26 researchers across the world, with over 7000 registered votes in a just a few weeks.
When BuzzFeed and the Sydney Morning Herald wrote-up separate articles promoting Nat Harris’s amazing cancer rap entry — we knew we were on to something. The large outward engagement via our competition seeded new scientific collaborations while one voter funded an entire year’s project ($80k) for one of our entrants.
Today
Since this initial success, we refocused our energy & purpose around building the technology tools for anyone to host their own innovation competitions. They can be used by science societies or universities to showcase & reward their researchers to engage & collaborate. They can be used by organisations to drive new research partnerships or celebrate the highest quality research. They can also be used by anyone to drive innovation important to them even if they haven’t raised a prize pool yet (via our crowd-funding option).
Since the success of our first competition, we have hosted many competitions helping fund over $150,000 for new research projects including over $15,000 coming via our crowd-funding tools used by two organisations. We’ve grown to host a community of over 40,000 including some of the worlds most innovative researchers & startups. We’ve helped bring nearly 1 million people to engage with hundreds of projects from institutes across the world & tens of thousands of registered votes.
This is just the beginning…
We are constantly developing and upgrading our technology to help our community. We’ve just launched the ability to host your own ‘Peer Prize’ which is really exciting and in the coming months we will have many new competitions launching from across the world hosted by small labs, passionate people all the way to large organisations. We thank-you for being part of the Thinkable journey so far. If you’d like to take a more active role in shaping our future, contact me via twitter, I’d love to hear from you.
Ben McNeil
Founder, Thinkable.org
