And I've just seen amazing things where, you know, a freshman at Berkeley wins $100,000 for coming up with this machine learning algorithm for Homeland Security, right? Or there's actually a woman who has won probably 15 different challenges. She was a psychologist who has now learned how to design in 3D, to get a 3D printer, and learn how to use that. She's learned robotics. She's gone back to school and gotten her PhD in quantum mechanics. It's crazy. In 1962, John F. Kennedy took the podium at Rice University in Houston and inspired a generation to reach for the stars. And now in 2022, NASA is investing in the Armitus project to bring us back to the moon. But this time to live. Thousands of things need to be figured out to make this a reality. And NASA is tapping into expertise from outside the agency to solve some of the biggest challenges. Today, I have Steve Rayder, who leads NASA's efforts to leverage crowd-based platforms for open innovation and bring value to NASA's programs and innovation efforts around the US government. Steve, welcome to the show. Thanks, Paul. Glad to be here. I love describing what you do, because it's got so many fun things in it. It's got NASA. It's got open innovation. And it has the US government, which is not something I think of when I think of innovation. I want to start. When I think of NASA, I picture government scientists working on rockets, trying to solve problems, not people from around the world participating in contests. What's the history of open innovation at NASA? Yeah, it's really interesting, because it really came out of necessity. About 11, 12 years ago, Dr. Jeff Davis was head of the human research areas within NASA. So all the things about experimenting on humans in space and life in space. And he got a big budget cut. Something like half of his budget just went away, which happens in the government from time to time. And he had to get really creative. Well, how are we going to still work on mitigating risks for humans in space by real research and trying to progress on real problems, but with a lot less money? So he really opened up to, OK, what are people doing out there? And he went out and benchmarked against a bunch of different companies that were being innovative and doing things. And he kind of stumbled on open innovation as a technique. And so he established a pilot of things around 20 to 30 different challenges on Innocentive. And they ended up with someone yet, too, and TopCoder. Just to see what if we go and do what these other companies are doing and start using crowds to solve problems. And lo and behold, almost all of those challenges were successful and found value and found technology and ideas and tapped into experts that we simply didn't have before. It's funny because right around that same time, about 2011, I actually read Jeff Howell's book on crowdsourcing. And I didn't work in that area at the time I worked over in analogians. And yeah, just trying to find the right skills, the right technologies, the right ideas. Really, the crowd gets you that kind of diversity, that kind of thing that you can't get just with deep expertise. And I think once we got into looking at crowdsourcing, that was what became very apparent was that things these days are moving really, really fast in technology and really, really this explosion of technology. And the old ways that we kept up with those things and tried to tap into those technologies is you simply went to some conferences and talked to some vendors and knew some old guys. And they would basically be able to impart with you the latest and greatest technologies. The problem we have today is things are moving so fast and there's so much work going on that you can't possibly even Google the latest and greatest technologies and hope to keep up. And so open innovation, it starts to provide kind of a drag net across all efforts going on across the world in different technologies and other industries that then we can actually bring in as our starting point to solve problems. The innovation is this kind of big process where you're trying to find technologies and ideas and then assemble them in a very constrained way towards a direct problem. And that takes a lot of work. But if you're not discovering all the things that are going on, then you're just gonna incrementally improve and somebody else is gonna pass you by. So we found that when you're trying to find the right skills, the right technologies, the latest and greatest ways of doing things, that the crowd was just really effective. And I think part of it showed us that as an agency, we have these great, really deep experts all around the agency that are able to do things in their regime that is just amazing. But what was happening on the rest of the world is technology was just exploding. We've got more people that are educated out in the world. There's more people going through university. There's a stat I use in my talk where I tell people that 90% of all scientists that have ever lived on planet Earth are alive and working today. That's how big this explosion is. And what we realized when we tapped into the power of the crowd is that we're able to tap into what's going on out there in a way that our experts really had no visibility into. You can't actually find all of the latest and greatest technologies that are being developed in all these different industries, in all of these different niche areas. And yet those things are sometimes the valuable starting point for your problem solving, for your innovation. And so Dr. Davis just found this really great methodology. We started an internal crowd at NASA. We started actually trying out various crowds, like top code, or like I say, Innocentive and Yet2. And just found that we got great algorithms when we tried to do algorithm work. We got great technical solutions when we went out looking for technical solutions. We've got software solutions in some cases. Like just every different kind of thing we tried where we didn't necessarily have all the resources in-house or they were over constrained, we would go to the crowd and get these great answers. And so we've been building on that over the last 10 years and now I've done almost 700 projects with really a lot of success. It's really fun. We're going to get into the projects because I know there's some very, very fun ones, including a space toilet. But before I get to that, we talk about what's in it for NASA. Hey, NASA needs these niche things, needs these experts that can really accelerate internal teams. But the thing that you hear time and time again about the platforms is that companies and agencies are exploiting these people. Like these people are out there and they're just, they don't want to hire them and all these people want to be hired. Why do people participate in these platforms? Why would they want to give up some of their time to help NASA solve its problems? This is one of the most fascinating questions that I've had from day one. In fact, after reading Jeff Housebook, I immediately joined like five different communities because I wanted to understand that question. Clay Shurkey has a book called A Cognitive Surplus that starts to delve into this, you know, why did thousands and thousands of people help make Wikipedia what it is today? It kind of goes against our thought of, I'm busy, how does anyone have time to do that? And the fact that is that people have passions and hobbies that you don't really realize until you see large groupings of people. I live next to, in Houston, I live downtown next to the George R. Brown Convention Center. And so there's all these conventions. And they have comic palooza where people come dressed as all these obscure characters. And then the next week, there'll be some other kind of quilting convention. And what you find is worldwide people have passions. And what's happening with these communities is they're coming together around a passion. And people are finding things that they think they're the only one in their community that are passionate about algorithms or software or bioengineering. And they're finding that there's maker spaces where they can do that kind of thing. And there's different places online that they can connect with nerds like them, you know, because that's how they feel, right? You're kind of this outcast and you're finding community. And what we see is in the best communities, they're actually motivating people with a number of incentives. We call them the 4G's, gold, guts, glory and good. And that's what's kind of driving these competitions. I add two more to that, which is why you even join it all, is to connect with community and to learn. People are trying to upskill and learn new things. So TopCoder has 1.6 million software developers and data scientists. Well, you don't just voluntarily join a community like that online unless you really care about it and you really want to do something with that. And that's what we find there, right? And so, you know, the gold is putting a prize out there so somebody can win a prize. A lot of that is, hey, this has a commercial value and we need to recognize that and reward someone for their work. Then there's guts, people just like working on hard problems. There's glory, people are trying to build a reputation. They want to be the best. And altruism, good. A lot of people participate on our NASA challenges because they want to be part of the mission. They want to be part of this moving people into space and they want to participate. And actually, I think this is one of the biggest and best developments for NASA is, hey, we now have a way that you don't just have to watch the launch. You can be part of the building of what we're doing and what we're trying to explore and part of the science. And so what I tell people is open innovation is totally voluntary. You're not trying to get people to do things for no money and you're putting it out there and saying, hey, I need to help solving this problem. Now, if you're gonna have a successful challenge, you need to have the right incentives and that means the right intellectual property stance. You know, are you asking for something that then you're gonna go turn around and make millions of dollars? Well, the crowd's gonna recognize that and they may not participate if you ask the wrong way. If you don't give enough prize money, if you don't give enough recognition. The thing is, most people that are doing this are doing it for the experience to learn and to connect with other people. And they're doing it in combination with prize, but it's seldom all about the money. And people that boil crowdsourcing down to just being about the money, haven't watched how these things work. Because if you're just starting out and you can actually win, say, an algorithm contest and it's something on genomics or something, you can then turn around and say, hey, I don't need five to 10 years of experience. Look what I did. I had a major advance in this biotech industry. And so it's kind of that reputation building piece. And this is what I tell people, innovation challenges are one of the few places in your life that you can fail without consequences. If you fail in a job, they don't like that. You just cost them money. If you fail during school, you get a bad grade. And you know, as much as learning and failure go together, our academic system doesn't really let you do that very well. And so I think people are discovering, hey, I'm gonna try this out. And if I fail, it's just my time. But it gives me a concrete way. And I'm talking with other people about it. And I'm collaborating. And it gives people a purpose to their learning. And I've just seen amazing things where, you know, a freshman at Berkeley wins $100,000 for coming up with this machine learning algorithm for Homeland Security, right? Or there's actually a woman, Lauren, fell in Australia, who has won probably 15 different challenges. She just submitted this last week on our Star Shade challenge. She was a psychologist who has now learned how to design in 3D, to get a 3D printer and learn how to use that. She's learned robotics. She's gone back to school and gotten her PhD in quantum mechanics. It's crazy. And yet she is just motivated by these things. And I would say challenges, I've talked to her actually, they changed the trajectory of her life. So they offer something new and different. Now, should we try to get all of our work using contests? No. It doesn't make sense. It's actually hard. There's a lot of work that goes into a challenge. You have to evaluate it. There's a signal to noise ratio you have to get. You get a lot of not great entries that you have to sort through. And so in a crowdsource challenge, you really want a mechanism that filters those out, but you're mining. You're mining for those gems. And you're mining for those people that have these amazing ideas that you don't have any other way of finding. It was interesting. I always think of Steve Jobs and the Apple Computer, because it was formed at a computer club. It wasn't their daytime job. It was a bunch of guys that got together in the valley. And it was that extracurricular thing, but they had a passion. And that passion ended up giving them a trajectory where they could find extreme success, of course. I remember when we were in Houston a couple of years ago, and we were at the Top Coder Challenge. And there was somebody in the community that got on stage, and he was kind of one of the, I guess, more senior or celebrated. He'd won a bunch of algorithm challenges. And he got emotional about the community and thing he was a part of. Yeah, he was proud that he won the algorithm. But he goes, I would always be in high school. And nobody understood that I was passionate about this thing. Like other people weren't talking about algorithms around the lunch table. And he said, everything I've learned and the people that I found are all because of this platform. And so for him participating was like people playing video games or talking about sports or these other things. It was just where his interest in passion lies. So thank you that it's just one of those questions. You and I are both sort of participate and try to really understand. And I think you articulated it amazingly well. You talk about algorithms. And there's this panacea that everybody talks about. And you mentioned it to me. So I'm going to call you on it. That says, one day, there'll be this magical algorithm that'll be able to assemble a team on demand to solve hard problems. And so in your mind's eye, you can see this. Explain to me how this is going to work. Yeah, I get really excited about this because, in my opinion, we're getting just better and better at tapping into human capacity. In business organizations, if you think about it, are not very efficient that way. They actually kind of, you have a manager and you try to put a high performing team together, but there's constraints. And you've got people that are there for a long time. And sometimes they're a good fit for this technical thing. And sometimes they're not. And that's kind of the thing that within businesses you're trying to do. You're trying to get these magical teams and motivate them and get them to make money for the company. In the community world, it's project-based. It's problem-based. So you kind of can have a little more efficiency there. When you start to layer on a well-organized community that actually starts to gather really deep data about its members and can start to look at using AI, using machine learning, things like personality types, optimal team size. So putting a team of seven people together and saying, look, for this particular problem, I need a chemist and a materials person and all the kind of detailed people. But then I also need an artist and a musician, people that really will bring a different sense to it. But then also be trying to match on, hey, I don't want all type of A's. I want to actually have some folks that are in different regimes, but that still work together. And then top that all off with consistent training around innovation, as well as a facilitator that knows how to actually get the best out of each of those people. And in fact, part of that algorithm could even be, hey, half of this team has to have worked together before. I had the opportunity to work as part of the X-38 team when I was at NASA about, oh gosh, 20 years ago. But we were building this really cool rescue vehicle to come back from space. And it was a Skunkworks project. It was something out in the middle of the field where we had a little building and we were all working and just doing everything. And that high-performing team, we just gel. Everyone trusted everyone else. And you could work at a velocity that was just unheard of. And you just felt a big part of that team because you knew how to actually kind of bob and weave with the team. It's possible to create that, you know, especially when you talk about a community of 500,000 people. If you get an algorithm that's even partially good at putting these high-performing teams together and putting them together just for the scope of trying to brainstorm a problem a little bit better, or one that actually goes all the way through building, that's something where people will love that. And they'll come back to that over and over because once you've had that experience, one, you're more effective. So you're gonna be really valuable and you'll be compensated as such. But the experience itself is such a driving, amazing experience that that's the only way you're gonna wanna work for the rest of your life. And so if you have this platform that's matching hard problems, multi-discipline problems, hard system problems, and actually getting teams to work on them that can be passionate about it and equipped, well-equipped, then you've kind of tapped into a level of human capacity that I think we miss a lot of times with our kind of traditional ways of doing business. When we think about NASA, we think about missions, right? So I was imagining you in a big field working on an escape vehicle for space, but it really ties to moving work to a project where the outcome is actually the starting thing. And so it's very easy for a team to look at that outcome and say, oh, I know exactly what we're doing. We're here to produce this thing as compared to, at least my experience in the corporate world where it's very confusing on what you're trying to, what the true outcome is. Sometimes it's political, sometimes it's tied to the business. I want to get into some stories. You talk about the challenges and things that are going on at NASA. So of the 700 challenges, give me the one, the one that either the audience is gonna like or the one that has been most interesting to you, where NASA reached out to the crowd and got a surprising result. Oh gosh, there's been so many fun ones. So one was we did the space poop challenge, right? And I thought that was just amazing. So the problem that our young engineer came to us and said, hey, look, I'm working as part of this team. We're trying to redesign the launch and entry suits. So those are those orange suits that you see, the space suits that the crew members are launched in so that if something happens, they're in a pressurized suit if they have to escape rapidly. And in that, they're launched. And on the mission that goes to the moon, you have that one burn, that one rocket burn that will take you out of low Earth orbit and towards the moon. And once you make that burn, once that rocket has done its thing, you are not coming back for like six days. You have to go all the way around the moon and come all the way back, right? If right after that burn, you have a leak in the cabin that you cannot stop, the backup to the cabin walls to keep you alive is that suit. You have to actually put that suit on and put your helmet on and you have to then live in that orange space suit for up to six days. And if you think about that for a second, one of the first things you might think is, hey, it's gonna be a problem when I actually have to go to the bathroom, right? And it's not just an ick factor here. When you're talking six days, if you've ever had a baby, you understand what diaper rash is. Well, diaper rash for six days can actually be a really a bad health problem. So we had this challenge called the space poop challenge where we basically challenged people to fix that problem. Hey, how do we deal with this in a space suit? And it ran on HeroX as the platform. And at the end of that challenge, we had 20,000 registrants and 5,000 submissions that people actually put work in there. Now HeroX actually filtered that down to almost a hundred challenges or submissions rather. And we took those results and kind of sorted through them and awarded winners. The winner of that challenge was actually, it was great. He was a Air Force flight surgeon who really lived only a few hours from Houston and he was very familiar with pressure suits. And he was a tinkerer. He built a bunch of different prototypes that showed us a bunch of different ideas that could be used. But the best one was to actually say, look, in laparoscopic surgery, we pressurized the belly of the person we're operating on up to 15 psi, which is the same as about what we have, the suit differential pressure. And he said, we actually insert this little airlock so that we can pass wipes and different attachments in and out of the belly. And wouldn't that work for your space suit? And it's just a perspective we had never seen. It's a technology we hadn't actually been familiar with. And it kind of turned us onto a whole new thing. And then we had two other, the second and third place that gave us really creative ideas around self-inflating air drying, dryers and kind of a pump that works in a really no power required way, along with this last guy who did a really creative design around wipes. But it turns out that this same solver went on and is now actually designing an entire satellite system for the National Geospatial Intelligence System as part of another challenge. So these folks that come in and out of this ecosystem are really fascinating and they're really driven and passionate. Now let me get to one of the new parts of the show where my eight year old daughter, Sydney, gets to ask you a question. I've been wondering, if astronauts are gonna leave on the moon, what are they gonna eat? Oh, what will people eat on the moon? Well, we're gonna see in not too many years here, they answer to that in real time. But it's kind of like camping, right? In camping, you can't take a ton of fresh vegetables and all the kind of fresh things if you go on a really long trip because there's no place to grow it, right? And so we're gonna have to get better at that. But in the meantime, when we first go to the moon, it'll probably be a kind of like these protein bars that your mom and dad might eat or that you might eat on a camping trip or kind of like candy bars, but more healthy for you. And then they'll actually have some regular food. It'll probably have all the water sucked out of it so that it can be lighter. And then we add water to it and rehydrate. And that's actually what they eat on the space station today. They pretty much regular food, it just has to be reheated a little bit differently in a special way. Steve, thank you for that advice. And I think you may have just come up with the next billion dollar idea. It's kind of like a candy bar, but healthy for you. Yeah. Steve, thanks so much for the conversation. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, wants to reach out to have you speak or just learn more about the thought leadership you're driving, what's the best way to find you? Easiest places on LinkedIn. Just look for Steve Rader and NASA and you'll probably find me. I'll put all the links to the contests and all of the stuff that you're doing in the show notes. And I really appreciate the time as always. Thanks, Paul. It's been great.
