In the face of looming challenges like childhood obesity, environmental collapse, and soaring healthcare costs, we need dramatic, sustained, and collaborative innovation. Dr. Liz Gerber, Professor of Northwestern University who specializes in human-computer interaction, design, and management, studies how new technology can support innovation work, develops practical tools, and provides resources for beginning entrepreneurs. In particular, Dr. Gerber examines collective innovation, an innovation process that harnesses the diverse and untapped human, social, and economic capital from distributed networks to discover, evaluate, and implement new ideas. As innovation is a challenging endeavor, collaboration is critical for drawing diverse insights, but is also difficult especially for novice entrepreneurs who don't have experience, networks, and knowledge of different technical languages. To this end, Dr. Gerber gathers interdisciplinary teams in the context of social computing, crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding to help novice innovators solve problems in domains anywhere from medical device design to toy development and entertainment.

Some of the products Dr. Gerber has studied and helped design include a medical device to improve hand hygiene in hospitals and Jerry the Diabetes Bear, a teddy bear with an interactive screen that was designed to help children with diabetes learn about their disease and how to take care of themselves by taking care of the bear. The hand hygiene product, in particular, was designed to help clean doctors’ hands in hospitals to avoid any unnecessary infection, and demonstrated a huge success, raising over $9 million and winning over 45 awards. Moreover, much of Dr. Gerber’s work have been featured in the media including Forbes, Fast Company, and on The Oprah Winfrey Show. With an interdisciplinary team of two co-PIs trained in computer science, learning sciences, and economics and 11 graduate students trained as social and computer scientists, she collaborates with researchers at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, MIT, and University of Illinois Urbana Champaign as well as industry at Facebook, Microsoft, and Adobe. To help derive creative, sustainable, and practical solutions to today’s societal challenges, Dr. Gerber continues to study innovation processes and develops design principles and novel socio technical infrastructure that supports and drives innovation forward.

Current projects include:

• Crowdfunding: Innovation depends on financial investment, and crowdfunding, or the request of resources through social media, plays a huge role in channeling billions of dollars into innovation projects each year and expanding the populations of people who participate in the innovation process, both on the founding and the funding sides. While crowdfunding is dramatically changing who can participate, we poorly understand this social phenomenon, and Dr. Gerber is working to understand this new and important platform, addressing how technology enables, motivates, and alters human interaction. Dr. Gerber’s future work in crowdfunding involves building new tools to improve performance for novices based on the community process model and distilling key design principles produced from her pioneering research.
• Digital Loft -- Scalable Social Computing Systems For Early-Stage Innovation Work: Dr. Gerber’s research into crowdfunding revealed that many crowdfunding participants underestimate the skills and amount of preparation necessary to run a successful crowdfunding campaign. In fact, successful campaigns are increasingly led by seasoned innovators with extensive, project-relevant professional networks to provide support at critical stages of the campaign. To help fill a need for targeted support among novice innovators who make up the vast majority of crowdfunding campaign creators, Dr. Gerber’s team developed the Digital Loft as an open, scalable, crowd based support system that was designed to make crowdfunding more effective. Not yet even in beta release, over 580 novice and expert innovators are using the Digital Loft, and Dr. Gerber and her team are currently preparing the system for use by two national non-profits with more than 8,500 members each, radically increasing their ability to collect data.
• Innovation Methods: Collaboration is key to successful innovation, and Dr. Gerber develops work practices to support group collaborations and networking in the innovation process. These work practices provide methods around idea generation, prototyping, and group work at the early stages of innovation. Novice and expert entrepreneurs can implement these research-driven, empirical principles in their product design and development processes to advance their products.
• Design for America (DFA) -- A National Laboratory for the Study of Collective Innovation: Through rigorous research, Dr. Gerber has found that existing infrastructure fails to support collective innovation in several key ways, particularly by neglecting the pressing needs, attitudes, and skills of novice innovators. Dr. Gerber is thus devoted to understanding and resolving these infrastructure failures, by not only advising top performing crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to refine their system for increased performance, but also by designing and implementing infrastructure with her own lab. In this way, she will be able to adjust the design in order to assess the relationship between infrastructure features and innovation outcomes. While the Digital Loft project emphasizes scalability, DFA emphasizes the research value of having rich, multi-modal data for grounded theory-building in a novel empirical domain. DFA is now made up of more than 3000 student members (52% women) from a nationwide network of innovation studios hosted by 24 universities, and pulls together interdisciplinary teams of students, faculty, professionals, and community partners to tackle social challenges they identify through an empirically studied innovation process.