INNOCENTIVE - Innovating Beyond Boundaries

1) About Innocentive
Founded in 2001, InnoCentive connects companies, academic institutions, and non-profit organizations, in one common goal: INNOVATE. Its network composes with more than 125,000 of the world's brightest minds on the world's first Open Innovation Marketplace™.
Their mission is to bring together creative minds to create breakthrough solutions that touch every human life. The areas of researches are very wide starting from system network, chemistry, biology, astronomy, design, nanotechnology, etc.
It might be a technical problem, a tricky business issue, a scientific hurdle, or a way to improve the quality of life.
The challenge types have official names: Ideation Challenge, Theoretical Challenge, Reduction to Practice Challenge.
The proliferation of prizes is attracting bright minds to stubborn problems.

2) Customers – the seekers, the companies, academic institutions and non-profit organizations post their challenges online and promise the financial awards for the best solutions. So far around 30% of the problems were solved.
· The seekers also get the consultancy service in order to make the most of its network. They also get help to correctly define their problem and estimate the appropriate award.
· The seeker increases significantly its R&D capacities.
· Reduce risk to costly research failures, and simply minimizes the costs of the research
· Creates the equal possibility and contributes to positive competition, small and medium companies can compete with Fortune 500, thus they achieve/maintain the competitive lead
· Stay ahead of competition through innovation and faster time to market
· Gain a lot of time in general, accelerate their R&D efforts
· Helps non-profit organizations to solve the life-changing challenges
· Enables breakthrough discoveries
· They reach to some of the world’s most creative thinkers
· Outsiders look at the problem from a completely different lens, innovation beyond the boundaries of your vision
· Project Roadblock
· Revival of the stalled projects
· Closure of the “dead” projects
· Good for image and a buzz

Suppliers – so called solvers, they supply with the solutions to the challenger. These are engineers, scientists, inventors, and business people.
· They get cash awards from 5,000 to 100,000 dollars, and they are protected to get the fair pay
· Their intellectual property is protected in the logistic and legal framework
· They have got the consultancy service as well, they got the feedback
· They are assured the confidentiality
· They enjoy the independence that comes to choosing what they work on and where they work, and when they work on it
· They have got an interesting intellectual challenge
· Recognition
· Business development opportunities
The end users of the companies and the society in general benefit from:
· Positive impact on the world
· Poor are being helped
· Breakthrough innovations
See also point 7 for additional benefits

The owner of the business:
· Positive contribution to the society
· Good image
· Participation in exciting discoveries

3) The categories of the customer groups served:
· Private companies
· Academic institutions
· Laboratories that got stuck with a problem
· Non-profit organizations

4) The revenue sources
· Gets the profit from the seeker, from the consultancy services.

5) Competitors offering similar services include NineSigma, Yet2.com, and YourEncore.

6) The model can be applied offline but it is much less efficient in terms of cost, time and money, and the number of participant. Online model offers an exceptional opportunity to take the most of it.

7) The model is sustainable; it is more and more used worldwide. There are already competitors that exist. The companies themselves start adopting the so called Open Innovation Networks.
· Towards a new mode of producing ideas
There are the following advantages, which is also true for INNOCENTIVE:
· Experimentation – encourages experimentation and following the paths that were not ever followed before
· Innovation – rapid breakthrough discoveries
· Competition – Eliminates artificial constrains on choice of technologies and approaches, real competition occurs allowing the best products and approaches to win
· Disruption – Enables disruptive products and approaches to rapidly achieve market acceptance or even dominance
· Option Creation – Maximizes options for developers and users
· Responsiveness – Ensures participation of many segments including potential end users in the development of products.
· Quality- Rapidly discovering and correcting the flaws

When your product project participates in the Open Innovation program:
· The product is seen as important and valuable to a critical mass of users
· Widespread peer attention and review
· Strong positive network effects to use of the product
· Potential contributors can judge with relative ease the viability of the evolving project
· Motives are beyond the simple economic gain

There is a clear manifestation of the trend of the time: the shift in power from centralized institutions and toward the individual – from the centre to the edge
Every person is a leader; it is a network of mindset, so called “intellectual capitalism”, a “factory in every garage”

Another important trend that comes with the open innovation is “The Rise of the Naked Corporation”. That is a real need in transparency that is required by the information democracy and empowered customers. There is a certain pressure on the companies to make corporate values and governance more visible.
Rather to be scared to become transparent, the companies can make the really good use of it. It is good in case if the company is ethical and has superior value preposition.
Companies benefit from the completely new relationships between them, researches, customers and partner.

8) If I owned the business
· I would have increased the number of seekers and solvers by creating an offline conference event. I would have created a significant interesting buzz, probably putting some videos online. Participation in national televisions.
· I would have expanded the revenue sources by creating an online training system, where people could exchange their knowledge in forms of lectures
· I would have had a growth model for the business in the following way. Every new coming seeker would benefit from the interesting offer, as well as those have recommended the site. For the solvers I would have created a lot of buzz, designed the success stories online, and would have put some videos with success stories and interviews.

All sorts of industries could create or benefit from the Open Innovation system, for example:
· P&G Collaborative Ideation and Validation, eg spinbrush
· Linux , operating system created with the assistance of developers all around the world.