How is technological innovation fostered? It can be developed in several ways but at least one must have creative and curious people who are very persistent. That is true but such personalities do not operate in a vacuum.

This basic theme was iterated by Alfred Spector, Google's vice-president of research and special initiatives, at a space innovation conference in Brussels, Belgium that I attended last week.

As a former teacher I took this theme as a reminder to all teachers: you may still be the secret ingredient to help make your students' dreams become a reality. You may even spark that dream.

Of course, Spector based his theme on fostering innovation on Google's example. First the vision has to be there, he said. For example, Google's founders had the vision 11 years ago of organising the world's information available on the Internet and making it available to anyone.

Of course, the base is the Internet, which has helped break down the barriers that prevent people from communicating and from accessing information. Google built on one innovation, and thousands of others have built and are building on their innovation.

But count people in as the ingredient that gets innovation moving. For example, one billion people use Google every day and one in five queries is about a topic that no one has searched for in the last three months.

"Curiosity is at the core of our vision," Spector said.

Google helped democratise the information by opening access and also by creating tools to help people leverage information. Spector himself is overseeing hundreds if not thousands of creative applications bubbling out of Google's creative pot.

These applications are tools people can use to achieve amazing results. Take the example of Eric Yam, a 17-year-old Toronto student who won the NASA's Space Settlement Competition grand prize for his age group.

Yam had persistence and a good teacher who encouraged him four years ago to enter the competition. Four years of trying and Yam eventually produced a 92-page report that covered every detail of his vision, including architecture, cost, social structure, economy and food supply.

His settlement concept, which beat out 309 other entries, revolves around a spinning, cylindrical-shaped structure for 10,000 residents. Yam created the design for the colony, called Asten, using Google's free, downloadable SketchUp tool (http://sketchup.google.com).

Google Earth is another basis for discovery and creative thinking. For example in Italy a computer programmer was browsing through the satellite images of his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. This led to the discovery of the remains of an ancient villa.

Meanwhile Denmark announced last month it would be using Google Earth to create awareness of climate change in the run up to an inter-governmental conference on the subject in December.

The visualisation allows users to see the expected consequences of climate change, such as greenhouse gas emissions by region, well as narrated virtual tours on mitigation and adaptation aspects (download into your Google Earth at www.google.com/cop15). Such free and open source platforms have helped spawn thousands of innovative ideas.

"Openness is at the heart of opening up innovation - the sharing of information," Spector said. "Open source apps for example have catalyzed innovation in applications software, for example Linux, Apache, MySEQ and others. This democratisation of information makes it possible for people to build on what other people have done before."

One way companies can get innovative minds to work for them is to run contests. Running contests is a cheap way to get innovation. For example Netflix, an online movie rental company, set a challenge in October 2006 to anyone who could come up with software that could do a better job of accurately predicting the movies customers would like.

To win the $1 million prize the software had to be at least 10 percent better at matching customers with movies than Netflix's in-house software, Cinematch. In September this year the company announced a team of statisticians had won the contest. Netflix presumably got a boost in its movie rental business and software that probably cost less than if it had tried to develop it in-house.

The proof? The company has kicked off another million-dollar contest. For the new contest contestants have to use demographic and behavioural data to model individuals' "taste profiles".

Google's idea of a contest is a bit different. The Google Lunar X Prize offers $30 million to the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth (www.googlelunarxprize.org).

The first deadline is December 31, 2012, after which the prize gets split up among various contestants depending on when they succeed. Spector believes some teams have already spent as much on the contest as the prize money.

There you go. Many such contests are available for innovators. I am sure somewhere in Bermuda someone will be sparked by such offers to give one a try.

Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com