The Open Innovation Competition is an interdisciplinary project sponsored by the School of Computer Science's Project Olympus, the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business, and the Institute for Social Innovation and the Masters of Information Systems and Management Program in the Heinz College.

The competition wasn't meant to yield potential startups in which the foundation might consider investing, but ideas that might produce tools that the venture capital firm could use. "We thought it would really be great if we could create an XYZ that would help us decide where to make our investments," Moldow said. Ultimately, one or more of the ideas from the competition might receive support as a commercialization or a "capstone" class project, he said.

The winning entry in the contest was developed by the Orange team consisting of Marina Santana and Joao Pina, both students in the master's degree program in software engineering; Logan Powell, a Tepper MBA student; Shing Yan Lau, a junior majoring in statistics; Elaine Lee, a senior majoring in mathematical sciences; and Rakesh Mishra, a Ph.D. student in the Mellon College of Science.

In its proposal, the team noted the success of the Delphi Method, an iterative process developed by the RAND Corp. in which a panel of experts anonymously answers questionnaires and the results are summarized by a facilitator over two or more rounds until a consensus emerges. To apply the method to forecasting Internet consumer trends, the team concluded that an extremely large group of experts would be required. They plan to use social networks to gather rankings regarding the merits of various Internet consumer ideas and then use an algorithm to evaluate each participant's predictive power over time.

"Thus, the most successful forecasters would emerge organically from the crowd and could be 'harvested' for their insight for a number of potential applications," the team said in its proposal.

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