InnoCentive
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InnoCentive is an open innovation and crowdsourcing company with its worldwide headquarters in Waltham, MA and their EMEA headquarters in London, UK. They enable organizations to put their unsolved problems and unmet needs, which are framed as ‘Challenges’, out to the crowd to address. In the case of InnoCentive, the crowd can either be external (i.e., their network of over 380,000 problem solvers) or internal (i.e., an organization's employees, partners or customers). Awards, typically monetary, are given for submissions that meet the requirements set out in the Challenge description. The average award amount for a Challenge is $20,000 but some offer awards of over $100,000. To date, InnoCentive have run over 2,000 external Challenges and over 1,000 internal Challenges, awarding over $20 million in the process. Wazoku acquired InnoCentive in July 2020.
InnoCentive is an open innovation and crowdsourcing company with its worldwide headquarters in Waltham, MA and their EMEA headquarters in London, UK. They enable organizations to put their unsolved problems and unmet needs, which are framed as ‘Challenges’, out to the crowd to address. In the case of InnoCentive, the crowd can either be external (i.e., their network of over 380,000 problem solvers) or internal (i.e., an organization's employees, partners or customers). Awards, typically monetary, are given for submissions that meet the requirements set out in the Challenge description. The average award amount for a Challenge is $20,000 but some offer awards of over $100,000. To date, InnoCentive have run over 2,000 external Challenges and over 1,000 internal Challenges, awarding over $20 million in the process. Wazoku acquired InnoCentive in July 2020.
History
The idea for InnoCentive came to Alpheus Bingham and Aaron Schacht in 1998 while they worked together at Eli Lilly and Company during a session that was focused on exploring application of the Internet to business. The company was launched in 2001 by Jill Panetta, Jeff Hensley, Darren Carroll and Alpheus Bingham, with majority seed funding from Eli Lilly and Company. Darren Carroll led the launch effort and became the first CEO. In 2005, InnoCentive was spun out of Eli Lilly with investments led by Spencer Trask of New York. In December 2006, shortly after Dwayne Spradlin took the helm as CEO, the company signed an agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to add a non-profit area designed to generate science and technology solutions to pressing problems in the developing world. Between 2006 and 2009, The Rockefeller Foundation posted 10 challenges on InnoCentive with an 80% success rate. In 2006, Prize4Life partnered with InnoCentive to launch the $1 million ALS Biomarker Prize, which was a Grand Challenge designed to find a biomarker to measure the progression of ALS – also known as Lou Gehrig's disease – in patients. In February 2011, the $1 million prize was awarded to Dr. Seward Rutkove for his creation and validation of a clinically viable biomarker. In early 2011, InnoCentive launched four more Grand Challenges on behalf of Life Technologies. In February 2012, InnoCentive acquired UK-based OmniCompete. In July 2020, InnoCentive was acquired by innovation platform Wazoku, expanding Wazoku's crowdsourcing and open innovation capabilities. The acquisition combined InnoCentive's solver network and expertise with Wazoku's software solutions, creating one of the world’s largest open innovation communities.
Products and services
User base
As of September 2017, there were over 380,000 users from nearly 200 countries in InnoCentive's problem solver network. All users have separately and specifically registered with InnoCentive and report expertise in a variety of fields including chemistry, life sciences, engineering, statistics, information technology, food and crop science and business. Nearly 60% are educated to Masters Level or above. InnoCentive have a number of partnerships that allow their clients access millions more users.
See also
List of crowdsourcing projects
References
External links
InnoCentive Home Page
Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1376461478 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.