From the course: Managing Innovation
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Crowdsourcing innovation
- Centuries before the ubiquity of the internet, a king's ransom was paid to crowdsource the British empire. In the mid-15th century maritime accidents and collisions between sailing vessels rose sharply, as Europe entered the Age of Discovery. Sea navigators could calculate the latitudes of their ships, but no method had been invented to calculate longitude. In 1707, four Royal Navy warships crashed into submerged rocks and sank off the coast of Cornwall killing 2,000 sailors. The Parliament of Great Britain soon issued the Discovery of Longitude at Sea Act. The first person to invent and produce a repeatable method to determine a ship's longitude at sea would receive an award of £20,000. John Harrison set out to win the award by inventing an accurate sea clock which, unlike pendulum clocks of the day, would be unaffected by raging seas. Harrison developed multiple prototypes. The first was a simple mainspring with a wooden…
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