Why Creative, Wild Ideas can Help us Solve the Mysteries of Neurodegeneration by Zoë Leanza and Drew Duglan
Published on Aug 23, 2024
Many years ago, an energy company was struggling with ice building up on power cables; workers would, quite precariously, climb telephone poles to physically shake the ice loose.
This was not an enviable job. Many people would fall and seriously injure themselves.
As the story goes, one day during their coffee break, employees were joking about alternative ways to clear the ice, building on each other’s wild ideas: Hire bears to shake the ice…Incentivize the bears by dripping honey from each telephone pole…Use a helicopter to airlift a giant honey spoon...
Hang on….
One team member – no longer in jest – commented that the powerful downwash from such a helicopter could actually be enough to shake the ice off.
Suddenly they reached a real solution and an approach that many companies use to this day: de-icing power lines with helicopters.
These low-pressure, unrestricted brainstorming sessions encourage creative thinking, empowering different perspectives and unique voices.
Sage Bionetworks leverages similar strategies across the organization. One example is our OpenChallenges platform, which focuses on crowdsourced solutions to research bottlenecks. Another is our Target Enabling Packages on the AD Knowledge Portal, which provide tools to promote understudied areas of Alzheimer’s disease.
The Best Ideas are often the Simple Ones
As well as building digital platforms that engage researchers and citizen scientists, we have devised a high-impact, low-resource, and most importantly – fun community engagement activity for in-person events.
Enter the Community Hypothesis Board!
This simple activity has been implemented at 11 scientific conferences (4 of them international) since 2019.
Attendees visit the AD Knowledge Portal exhibit booth, where they are polled on a disease-relevant question. Participants contribute their answer by simply adding Post-it notes to the board.
The first time we conducted this collaborative brainstorming exercise, we were nervous it might not yield much engagement. After all, in an exhibit hall full of extravagant booths and interactive displays, what would attendees think of our empty poster board, modestly displayed like a science fair project?
But the community reception was overwhelmingly positive.
In fact, the activity was so popular that it was used by conference organizers to advertise future events; it trended on X (then Twitter); with PIs and postdocs later requesting the engagement strategy be implemented at future conferences. We have explored different questions and different ways of voting, but always preserve the creative energy present at that first iteration.
From our years of experimenting, here are some of the lessons we learned from engaging the Alzheimer’s disease research community in this way.
Why does this Work?
Much like the coffee breakthrough that inspired the power company, the AD Knowledge Portal community poll works because it de-risks underexplored ideas. In its simplicity and interactivity, it encourages meaningful exchanges among the scientific community.
As one 2022 participant noted, the activity invites spontaneous discussions, “letting [researchers] see what other people think, and get inspired to do something new or creative.”
Challenging (but approachable) Prompts
The questions are chosen intentionally, considering factors like conference size or audience experience. The best questions were phrased in an open-ended and approachable way, defying cultural and linguistic barriers to invite broad participation.
The activity has yielded participant responses ranging from the exploration of novel therapeutic targets to the study of specific proteins. The crowdsourced answers from the 2019 poll reveal dozens of unique solutions, plus witticisms like “more money” and “better snacks.”
Consistency and Reach
We discovered that attendees preferred tracking a single question over time, rather than introducing a new question each day. This continuity allowed for deeper engagement and reflection.
Another dimension we explored was dot voting, sometimes with distinct colors to differentiate between researchers in industry and academia. While this color differentiation did not add much to the activity, a few recent iterations of the community hypothesis board were successful with the dot voting approach.
Observing the progression of responses, 2022 revealed a strong support for tau, immune, and metabolic hypotheses; followed by a community desire to investigate mitochondrial metabolism, vascular, and epigenetic biological domains in 2023. This year, the community seemed confident in immune and vascular hypotheses, with strong support for mitochondrial dysfunction as well.
Social media posts like this can be used to amplify the activity’s reach, extending engagement beyond the physical conference space and fostering further discussion online.
Final Thoughts & Broader Applications
Leveraging these simple activities as tools for engagement can be a powerful way to promote creative brainstorming, at both academic conferences and as part of internal research strategies for labs and institutes.
Creating low-pressure, casual spaces for thoughtful discussion can help us break out of our existing thought patterns and research silos, fostering meaningful new connections within and across research communities.
We believe that with enough of these connections, we can dissolve research biases, cultivating fertile ground to solve our biggest biomedical problems.
Together, we can develop innovative interventions for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Together, we can shake the ice off the research power lines.
What are your wild ideas around Alzheimer’s disease/research? Join the discussion below!