Crowdsourcing, the Gulf Oil Spill and the Arrogance of BP

Crowdsourcing, the Gulf Oil Spill and the Arrogance of BP(blog.crowdspring.com)

19 points by rosskimbarovsky 16 years ago | 13 comments

gaius 16 years ago |

A "solution" isn't an idea. Ideas are 10 a penny. How many of those solutions were actual plans that could be put into effect, bills of materials, Gantt charts, cost breakdowns?

Personally I would rather BP be getting on with the job than reading unsolicited email from the peanut gallery.

Oh, and to put that $2.35Bn into perspective, Union Carbide paid out $450M for, umm, killing 20,000 people at Bhopal. BP has made a huge mess sure, but after the initial explosion, no-one has died. I think Americans need to take a good long hard look at themselves in a mirror before getting on their high horses.

Mc_Big_G 16 years ago | |

Oh, and to put that $2.35Bn into perspective, Union Carbide paid out $450M for, umm, killing 20,000 people at Bhopal

First of all, let's not pretend like all American's are happy with Union Carbide's "punishment" for that incident.

Second, BP isn't paying for deaths. They must pay for the monumental cleanup and economic damages resulting from the environmental disaster they caused. It's expensive.

According to the article, Innocentive has a global network of more than 200,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, and business people who are experts in physics, chemistry, math, life sciences, computer science, and many other fields.. I wouldn't be so fast to discount the worth of their ideas. It's that kind of arrogance that got them in trouble in the first place.

gaius 16 years ago | | |

According to Innocentive, perhaps. But my point stands: how many of these solutions were actually actionable? And even if all thousand of them are - the engineers qualified to evaluate them are all busy working on the problem themselves!

This just looks like some free publicity for Innocentive. Maybe they're the arrogant ones?

rosskimbarovsky 16 years ago | |

That's certainly a fair point - proposed solutions aren't guaranteed to work. But given InnoCentive's long history of helping the government and some of the world's smartest companies solve really complex problems, surely it was worth at least an exploration. I'm certain the InnoCentive community would have helped - and still will - whittle the ideas down to those that make the most sense.

The simple truth is that BP isn't able to solve the problem. I hope they will. But for the moment, rejecting potential solutions seems short sighted.

temphn 16 years ago | |

Little known thing that shocked me when I read it: credible reports (including that of the external investigator) concluded that Bhopal was sabotage, not negligence. A disgruntled employee backed up a tanker and dumped water into a chamber without realizing the consequences. This individual obviously couldn't pay damages an it is more convenient to have the evil corp bad guy.

It is interesting that one never even HEARS the other side of this story.

Groxx 16 years ago | |

So environmental damage to many thousands of square miles (how many cubic?) has no/low implied cost, only human damages?

That's not exactly a good message to be sending to businesses.

gaius 16 years ago | | |

That's not what I said. Rather, much is made about how BP is not doing enough, yet what it has already done dwarfs what UC did. And Americans didn't bat an eyelid.

shaddi 16 years ago |

Official word from Innocentive: http://blog.innocentive.com/2010/06/23/innocentive-oil-spill...

mcknz 16 years ago |

We need ideas to replace oil or at least find safer ways to extract it -- this X-Prize model does not work in a crisis, especially when there are already credible strategies. There is not time to start from scratch, and BP sure as hell isn't the entity to evaluate the feasibility. They have enough to do. BP's call for ideas is pure PR.

captaincrunch 16 years ago |

I had an idea today, where you'd take a large heavy Prism and lower it where the pipe would go- the pipe would have to be removed. The pressure of the oil coming out would push the sand around the prism, and allow the prism to sink. The prism would obviously continue to sink, and it could follow with concrete rubble.

danielnicollet 16 years ago |

Unbelievable. Especially after reading the official word from Innocentive posted by shaddi in this thread. Do we know at least what BP's rationale. They seem to be focused on spending minimally on additional efforts to close the open well or cleanup the spill and really rely on the August relief well as the only worth investment right now.

Their rationale: Can't just be cost containment? That would be so idiotic and short sighted! They are going to be dealing with this as a corporation for decades...

They should be owning up to it now. But maybe it's just short sightedness of the people in charge currently. They will likely all be retired long before this is over...

eitally 16 years ago | |

The rationale is simple: it freaking complex for a large corporation to navigate legal wranglings with "normal" trading partners during the best of times; given that they are currently embroiled in what already may bankrupt them, it does not make sense to embark upon a partnership with an unknown entity type.

Put simply -- they know what they know and they know what they don't know, and they're worried that if they step outside the comfort zone of redlines, LOLs, and escape clauses that they could worsen rather than improve the current situation.

<edit> That said, it is really myopic of them and it does demonstrate a possibly disastrous lack of foresight.