What is the INOCENTIVE concept ?
“ Innocentive ” is a Global Web Community of Open Innovation. The fonder is Alph Bingham.
This community gathers academic institutions, companies, public sector and orgnizations ; all of those organizations meet a strong interest for breakthrough innovation.
Innocentive company offers services in a variety of disciplines like: food & agriculture, business & entrepreneurship, chemistry, physical science, IT, and mathmatics…
About the concept: The organizations (seekers) present its R&D challenge to the community of INNOCENTIVE and solvers work on the best solution to solve and succeed in that challenge.
Customers can be corporate seekers like huge commercial companies (Avery Dennison, Eli Lilly, Janssen, Procter & Gamble) or Non-profit organizations (like charitable organizations, or Trade Unions, or Art organizations) and the objective for INNOCENTIVE is to help these organizations, in exploring and developing the open innovation benefits for them.
Seekers pay Innocentive a fee for posting the challenge, and sometimes pay also a commission on the awarded amount.
The solvers (people and organizations) belonging to that community can be: expert in a
specific field; scientists, engineers, but also anyone with skills in specific area, or also
business people and inventors. They registered with Innocentive to solve the challenges.
They get benefit from proposing the best solution; in term of professional recognition, and
also financial awards paid to them (range from $5,000 to $1 according to the complexity
of the problem). Solvers don’t have to pay for getting the challenges and for proposing a
solution.
The solution is added value for the organization which gets benefits in term of innovation whereas there is no R&D department. Such an advantage for the business owner.
This concept uses human creativity, and competences to solve challenges in diversified activities like: commercial, governmental, but also humanitarian organizations.
Challenges can be very different:
- Oil Spill Recovery Challenge : In november 2007 an oil industry outsider solved the challenge thanks to his expertise. He was awarded $20,000 for his creative solution:
- Solver brings light to African village: An electrical engineer solved a challenge by invention
of a dual purpose solar light:
An important partner of Innocentive is Rockefeller. They have adapted the concept of open innovation to helping the poor population, and non profit organizations.
Open Innovation takes very important place in some different fields like: climate change, food security or economic growth.
The customer groups served are different:
1) the corporate, and private companies that are interested in getting solutions to their activities development and growth. They can meet different challenges (innovation for diversification, activities and products, face competition, new position on market…)
2) the non profit organizations: Innocentive can bring them many help in developing solutions for topics like: climate changes, reducing poverty in developing countries. They are involved in changing the world with human and philanthropic values.
The revenue sources are different:
Innocentive has received a huge investment from Spencer Trask Venture, which is a private equity firm focused on discovering and developing the innovations that will have a profound impact on the 21st Century.
Moreover, Organizations pay a fee to post their challenge….
Innocentive gets also fees from some of the award amount.
Competitiors of Innoventive:
It doesn’t seems to be direct competitors, because of the specific position of Innocentive on her market, and due to the specific mission statement (global community with seekers and solvers working on open innovation).
However, there are other companies specialized in Innovation Management like:
YET2.COM: They help “private companies to identify and capture the full value of their intellectual assets”. They offer services of technology evaluation; licencing, business development, and R&D needs.
http://www.yet2.com/app/about/home
INNOSIGHT: growth through innovation. They help companies to create a culture of innovation, and to define an innovation strategy. Ways to develop new business models, and new growth opportunities for their clients. They have developed models of consultancy, and diagnostic, and they provide a complete solution adaptated to each problem.
http://www.innosight.com/
Innocentive comes out with a specific dimension and philosophy. To me this model is based on the different links between stakeholders like: private companies, non profit companies, governments, seekers, solvers, and investors.
The concept is actually funded on that community exchanging online. The actors share informations ; answer and responses come trough all these exchanges, and the community exists with that Online model. So I don’t think it could exists as well Offline.
In my opinion, the framework of Innocentive is very well built because of the opportunities which appear in term of development and growth, but also with the values shared in that concept. Open minded values; the use of external intellectual resources for any company which which wants to be strong actor on its market. All this represents a new dimension for external vision of Innovation. Informations come from all parts in the world, with skills that are present everywhere. The opportunity to work on Non profit organizations, to help the poor countries and populations gives a very positive image of this company. To me this specific concept should be scaleable and sustainable.
If I owned such a concept, perhaps I would develop more 2 separate models:
The first more focusing on very important companies with more important resources and needs, and with a specific approach in term of services which are necessarily more complex.
And I would offer another model matching more with small companies needs. They have more often specific needs and we could use the same idea of sharing a challenge, but the needs and answer fit that specific model.
Perhaps the concept could be developed by new ways to earn money:
For the solvers: they have free access and they can present their response 10 times for free and after we could implement like a subscription if they become frequent user
For the seekers: I would keep the system free for the non profit organization, and subscription for private companies, with rate scales, dependind of the company size.
mardi 21 juillet 2009
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