Edmond J. Safra Lab Partners with InnoCentive to Identify Systems to Monitor Institutional Corruption

The Lab at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics is running a Challenge with InnoCentive, a pioneer in open innovation and crowdsourcing, to seek innovative systems that help expose corrupting forces within public and private institutions. This Challenge is an extension of the work currently being conducted by the Center's Research Lab on institutional corruption. Through this Challenge, the Lab's ultimate goal is to find and deploy tools, databases, or other technologies that help monitor institutions so they can then better serve their intended purpose, as well as their relevant constituencies. The Challenge, which carries a total of $8,000 in awards, focuses on the potential of monitoring as a mechanism to combat corrupting forces within an institution. Center Director and Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig said, "We are eager to encourage innovative thinking about this critical problem from the widest range possible, and I am excited about the potential this approach presents."

This Challenge asks Solvers to develop an innovative system or set of tools that will facilitate the detection and aggregation of information regarding corrupting forces within public or private institutions such as government, regulatory agencies, businesses and professions, including medicine, academia and the law, in a way that is easily accessible and useful to relevant constituencies. For example, with the internet and crowdsourcing, organizations such as maplight.org, or even yelp.com, have been successful in exposing information that is of concern to citizens and consumers in a meaningful way. This Challenge is open to anyone with a solution that fits the published criteria, and requires only a written proposal. Submissions will be accepted through November 8, 2011 and winners will be announced in late December or early January.