Amateur Science for Profit!

Reginald Smith

In order to be an amateur scientist, you must have fun doing what you do. Most amateur scientists need no financial incentive to invest time comparable to an actual job into their pet projects. However, if someone offered you money for your ingenuity, would you not jump at the chance?

For amateur scientists with an interest and bent in chemistry, biology, or medicine, InnoCentive® offers an extremely attractive proposition. InnoCentive, founded by pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, is a website that was set up to help pharmaceutical companies speed product innovation. Pharmaceutical companies will often invest a large amount of time, money and effort to create a test or synthesize a chemical compound for a commercial product to no avail. The idea behind InnoCentive is to inform the public about unsolved goals and award cash prizes to those who solve the problem. The cash prizes offered are not trivial. They range from a minimum prize level of $10,000 to a maximum of $100,000 for solving one problem.

Often what InnoCentive asks is for you to synthesize a chemical compound (whose structure they provide) up to a given level of purity and then submit your answer along with ceding the intellectual property rights to the contest sponsor. The contest sponsors are all anonymous but you will be delivered your prize if your process or chemical meets the standards. Granted, the company will go on to possibly make millions with the compound, but it is a rare opportunity to get a direct financial reward from working on a problem.

Signing up for InnoCentive is free and easy and can be done through the website. A brief description of the problems are available to the public, and a full description is available after you sign on to a problem. Signing on to a problem requires you to fully adhere to confidentiality standards regarding that certain contest. It also gives you procedures to submit your winning design or chemical to claim your prize.

This sounds great, but do amateur scientists stand a chance? They do! In fact, a researcher at MIT, Karim Lakhani, discovered that among the winners of InnoCentive prizes, 35% of the winners did not have a Ph.D. In fact, Lakhani also found that winners were more likely not to have specialized knowledge in the area of the contest, though they often had specialized knowledge in other fields of science.

Consider winner Edward Melcarek, a Canadian who has a masters degree in engineering science. Melcarek's specialties extend far beyond what his degree suggests, for his technical background includes remote sensing, particle physics, aerospace structures, avionics, analog and digital electronics and specialized processing machinery.

This could be a great opportunity for any ambitious amateur scientists (or teams) to pursue. If you are REALLY good, you could even supplement your income through winning a contest(s). I think the members of SAS and other amateur scientists are more than ready to take advantage of this great opportunity.