Crowdsourcing, and open innovation practices more broadly, have been widely adopted throughout the life sciences. In a recent contribution it was determined that ¼ of the top 20 biomedical companies (those with revenues in excess of US$10 billion in 2019) had a comprehensive and actionable commitment to engaging in such activities [1]. To foster engagement with a broad pool of ‘citizen scientists’, successful open innovation tactics routinely borrow elements of games (gamification), to marshal, contain, and facilitate the production of novel insight to scientific problems. Indeed, there is a burgeoning adoption of ‘Scientific Discovery Games’ (SDG) in the context of biomedical research [2, 3]. Most recently, a number of examples of SDG embedded in digital platforms - places of high virtual ‘foot traffic’ - have been realized yielding critical scientific insight. That meaningful work can be realized in a recursively simulated environment has profound implications for the future of work (in all fields of human endeavor) [4, 5]. In the proposed contribution, recent open innovation and crowdsourcing contributions to research in the life sciences, including but not limited to computational chemistry, will be reviewed. Examples of SDG will be presented and the use of games-embedded-within-platforms will be discussed. Implications and opportunities for computational chemistry, as an important supporting field within the life sciences, will be articulated.

Platform enabled participation in serious science

Fall 2022 abstracts, posters, and presentations will launch in mid-September.

ACS Fall 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.