Wazoku Blog

InnoCentive is now part of Wazoku

Waltham, Mass.—June 14, 2011—InnoCentive, the global leader in Challenge Driven Innovation, today announced two partnerships that extend the company’s global reach into the Middle East and South America. The company is partnering with Innoway, a leading innovation consulting and training company in South America, and INNOVABIA, a company that provides strategic and innovation strategy consulting to companies in the Middle East and North African (MENA) regions.

The Middle East and South America represent economies that are looking to innovation to expand their footprint beyond raw materials. In recent years, there have been numerous investments dedicated to research as these regions work to narrow the innovation gap that exists between them and the rest of the modern world. Recognizing the growth potential that exists in each of these markets, Brazil in particular, there is significant opportunity to tap into unknown global talent.

“Organizations take advantage of only 20 percent of their available human talent, which is just not enough to advance innovation and allow an organization to be truly competitive,” said Ari Piovezani, CEO of Innoway. “Innoway was founded in order to exploit that critical 80 percent and provide new levels of innovation. We look forward to working with InnoCentive to bring unique and unbeatable solutions to global corporations in South America.”

Founded in 2002, Innoway provides organizations with an innovation methodology to tap into internal corporate capacities and talents. Serving South America, with a specific focus on Brazil, Argentina and Chile, Innoway enables companies to advance human corporate potential to reach its best possible performance. Innoway’s collaboration with InnoCentive offers regional organizations the opportunity to acquire a level of maturity while overcoming the recurrent challenges a growing organization—within a growing economy—may face.

“Traditional thinking and solutions to problems and challenges is no longer an efficient approach to innovation,” said Osama Ghanim, co-founder and CEO of INNOVABIA. “Business challenges exist everywhere and require a different approach in order to find the most effective solution in a timely manner. By partnering with InnoCentive, we offer our customers the opportunity to open an important dimension to solving critical business challenges.”

INNOVABIA assists organizations in becoming more innovative by utilizing the best international methodologies and practices. By helping companies drive their resources toward innovation, INNOVABIA assists in a rapid adoption of an innovation-based culture at all levels of an organization. InnoCentive’s alliance with INNOVABIA will create opportunities for businesses in the MENA region to become more competitive on a global scale.

“InnoCentive is committed to partnering with companies that have displayed expertise in advancing open innovation in their respective regions,” said Dwayne Spradlin, president and CEO of InnoCentive. “Partnering with Innoway and INNOVABIA illustrates our focus and investment in the growth of global innovation through locally supported efforts. We look forward to the collaboration in these international markets to accelerate problem solving and innovation worldwide.”

About InnoCentive

InnoCentive is the global leader in Challenge Driven Innovation that bridges the gap between great ideas and actual solutions to drive measurable results. Recognized as an open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer, InnoCentive’s proven methodology, expanding global community of millions of problem Solvers, and cloud-based technology platform enable organizations to tap all potential sources of innovation – employees, customers, partners, and the world’s largest Solver community – to accelerate their pace of innovation and evolve into true Challenge Driven Enterprises. Leading commercial, public sector, and nonprofit organizations such as Eli Lilly, Life Technologies, NASA, nature.com, Popular Science, Procter & Gamble, Roche, Rockefeller Foundation, and The Economist partner with InnoCentive to help them solve their most pressing problems and challenges. For more information, visit www.innocentive.com.

InnoCentive is now part of Wazoku

Waltham, Mass.—April 26, 2011—InnoCentive, Inc., the global leader in Challenge Driven Innovation, along with The Economist, today announced the winners of The Economist-InnoCentive Entrepreneurship Challenge. Anjai Lal, a second year MBA student at the Yale School of Management, and Sasha Vyash, a second year student at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, will be awarded a total of $10,000 for their solution. The Challenge, which prompted the opening of more than 1,200 project rooms and received more than 100 submissions on the InnoCentive website, asked participants to create a disruptive business model in order to reinvent the established and prevailing means of doing business.

The winning solution—Agro-Engine—is a portfolio management tool that provides assistance for those in the retail and agriculture sectors to better allocate resources for portfolio optimization, particularly in emerging markets such as India. A typical farmer’s portfolio, for example, would consist of crops he or she intends to grow. With Agro-Engine, it would incorporate multiple inputs, such as previous track record, financial constraints, risk appetite, and time to market in order to better identify which crops to grow. With increased usage and data availability, Agro-Engine would become increasingly robust, enabling the identification of trends and useful recommendations.

“The Entrepreneurship Challenge was addressed at our Ideas Economy conference where the prevailing theme was innovation,” said Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Global Correspondent for The Economist. “The Agro-Engine, which clearly embodies the theme of innovation, is without a doubt a disruptive business model that could change the way emerging markets manage their retail and agricultural sectors.”

“This Challenge allowed us to identify a new approach to managing resources,” said Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of InnoCentive. “Without the ability to manage resources in these emerging markets, farmers and retailers alike would not be able to meet market demand, especially as demands change year over year. Anjai and Vyash’s solution is a great addition to the retail and agriculture sectors to help farmers and corporations track trends to better plan for the future.”

The winners were chosen from several finalists who presented their solutions to an expert panel at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Innovation event at the University of California Berkeley in March. The panel included Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Director for Draper Fisher Jurvetson; ChineduEcheruo, Chairman and Founder of Hopstop.com; and Krisztina “Z” Holly, Vice Provost, Innovation at the University of Southern California.

For more information on InnoCentive, visit the company’s website at www.innocentive.com.

About The Economist (http://www.economist.com/)
 

Edited in London since 1843, The Economist is a weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science, technology, culture, society, media and the arts. The Economist has a North American circulation of 813,000, a global circulation of more than 1.4 million and 4 million monthly unique visitors at The Economist online. Because of its international editorial perspective, it is read by more of the world’s political and business leaders than any other magazine.

About InnoCentive

InnoCentive is the global leader of Challenge Driven Innovation that bridges the gap between great ideas and actual solutions to drive measureable results. Recognized as an open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer, InnoCentive’s proven methodology, expanding global community of millions of problem Solvers, and cloud-based technology platform enable organizations to tap all potential sources of innovation – employees, customers, partners, and the world’s largest Solver community – to accelerate their pace of innovation and evolve into true Challenge Driven Enterprises. Leading commercial, public sector, and nonprofit organizations such as Eli Lilly, Life Technologies, NASA, nature.com, Popular Science, Procter & Gamble, Roche, Rockefeller Foundation, and The Economist partner with InnoCentive to help them solve their most pressing problems and challenges. For more information, visit www.innocentive.com.

InnoCentive is now part of Wazoku

WALTHAM, Mass. – April 25, 2011 – InnoCentive, the global leader in Challenge Driven Innovation, today announced that it has partnered with Life Technologies for the first phase of the $7 million Life Grand Challenges. A Grand Challenge is a well-formed problem – or series of problems – whose solution has high value and far-reaching consequences in the areas of human health, public safety, education, the environment, and energy. Grand Challenges typically have a collective award of $1 million and higher.

Life Technologies’ first three Grand Challenges, each with a $1 million award, focus on doubling the scalability, speed, and accuracy of its Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM)™. This breakthrough innovation – a printer-size instrument that can quickly sequence segments of the genome using semiconductor technology – holds the promise of democratizing the DNA sequencing market. Life Technologies’ goal for the three Grand Challenges is to produce twice as much sequence data, twice as fast, and with twice the accuracy. These Challenges are now posted in the Life Grand Challenges Pavilion on InnoCentive.com.

Based on its efforts with Life Technologies, and past successes with organizations such as the Prize4Life, which awarded $1 million to Dr. Seward Rutkove for his groundbreaking ALS biomarker discovery, InnoCentive is also announcing an expansion to its Grand Challenge Program. This program leverages InnoCentive’s proven Challenge Driven Innovation methodology to provide an end-to-end Grand Challenge solution that is uniquely configured to the specific needs of InnoCentive’s Seeker clients.

The InnoCentive Grand Challenge Program offers significant brand-enhancing opportunities which induce the public via open innovation and crowdsourcing to either address a problem that matters for the public good or solve a high-value problem that matters to any business, agency, or non-profit organization. In addition to InnoCentive’s 250,000-strong global community of creative and passionate problem Solvers, extended reach of targeted marketing efforts to millions of potential Solvers is achieved via InnoCentive’s expanding partner network which includes Environmental Defense Fund, Nature Publishing Group, Popular Science, and The Economist.

“It’s amazing to think about how far DNA sequencing has progressed over the last couple of decades and the tremendous potential that Life Technologies’ efforts can have on human health and disease,” said InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin. “The dramatic increase in interest we’re seeing for Grand Challenges has validated the passion within InnoCentive, our Seeker clients, and our Solver community due to the amazing impact that solutions to these critical Challenges can have.”

For more information about InnoCentive, visit the company’s website at www.innocentive.com.

About InnoCentive, Inc.

InnoCentive is the global leader of Challenge Driven Innovation that bridges the gap between great ideas and actual solutions to drive measureable results. Recognized as an open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer, InnoCentive’s proven methodology, expanding global network of creative and passionate problem solvers, and Cloud-based technology platform enable organizations to tap all potential sources of innovation – employees, customers, partners, and InnoCentive’s unmatched Global Solver Community – to accelerate their pace of innovation and evolve toward becoming true Challenge Driven Enterprises. Leading commercial, public sector, and non-profit organizations such as Eli Lilly, Medtronic, NASA, Nature.com, Procter & Gamble, Roche, Rockefeller Foundation, and The Economist partner with InnoCentive to help them solve their most pressing problems and challenges. For more information, visit www.innocentive.com.

InnoCentive is now part of Wazoku

Waltham, Mass.—April 13, 2011—InnoCentive, the global leader in Challenge Driven Innovation, today announced the availability of The Open Innovation Marketplace: Creating Value in the Challenge Driven Enterprise, a book co-authored by InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin and co-founder Alpheus Bingham, that provides strategic guidance on how organizations can dramatically increase their innovation effectiveness and business performance.

“The Challenge Driven Enterprise represents a new vision with far-reaching implications for improving the speed, agility and efficiency of business,” said Spradlin. “It enables powerful new modes of innovation while creating the flexibility to capitalize on new business opportunities. 21st century leaders are already realizing the scale of the change required. They must engage users, partners, customers and an entire world of problem solvers to stay innovative, deliver new products and dominate the competition. ”

Through illustrative case studies including NASA, Proctor & Gamble, Eli Lilly and the nonprofit Prize4Life, authors Spradlin and Bingham describe an innovation framework called Challenge Driven Innovation which accelerates traditional innovation outcomes by leveraging open innovation and crowdsourcing, along with defined methodology, process and tools to help organizations develop and implement actionable solutions to their key problems, opportunities and challenges. This proven framework and methodology helps organizations establish the process, discipline and communication necessary for continuous and sustained impact, ultimately facilitating their transformation into Challenge Driven Enterprises.

“Many of the current business processes relating to innovation were forged before the world became truly connected,” said Bingham. “New innovation processes need to reside on an innovation architecture that reflects a world where knowledge is fluid, where connections are fast, and where objective transcends geography. Challenge Driven Innovation, the topic of the first half of the book, was designed with this reality in mind.”

Readers of The Open Innovation Marketplace will learn how to:

• Integrate multiple innovation channels in one high-value framework: How to successfully choose and integrate complementary innovation sources

• Access the “long tail” of expertise and a whole world of innovators on demand: Tap innovation from an entire planet of creative and passionate problem solvers

• Gain the breakthrough benefits of a Challenge Driven Enterprise: Virtualize and transform the business for twenty-first century competitiveness

• Transform the organization by enabling open innovation and better business practices: Overcome the Not Invented Here (NIH) mentality and unleash the organization’s true innovation potential

“Seldom is there a book on innovation that aims to innovate both the innovation process and the firm itself,” said John Seely Brown, co-chair, Deloitte Center for the Edge. “This book shoots high and delivers! The Open Innovation Marketplace is both inspirational and practical. It lays out the foundations for a new kind of twenty-first century firm – the Challenge Driven Enterprise – that is agile, fast, and can leverage capabilities from around the world. This book is a must read not only for R&D managers, but even more so for CEOs and CFOs, especially those CFOs that seek leverage beyond just financial leverage.”

The Open Innovation Marketplace is available today. More information, along with a video summary, is available online at www.innocentive.com/about-us/open-innovation-marketplace.

For more information about InnoCentive, read our story here.

About InnoCentive, Inc.

InnoCentive is the global leader of Challenge Driven Innovation that bridges the gap between great ideas and actual solutions to drive measureable results. Recognized as an open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer, InnoCentive’s proven methodology, expanding global network of creative and passionate problem solvers, and Cloud-based technology platform enable organizations to tap all potential sources of innovation – employees, customers, partners, and InnoCentive’s unmatched Global Solver Community – to accelerate their pace of innovation and evolve toward becoming true Challenge Driven Enterprises. Leading commercial, public sector, and non-profit organizations such as Eli Lilly, Medtronic, NASA, Nature.com, Procter & Gamble, Roche, Rockefeller Foundation, and The Economist partner with InnoCentive to help them solve their most pressing problems and challenges. For more information, visit www.innocentive.com.

InnoCentive is now part of Wazoku

Boston and Waltham, Mass. February 24, 2011 – InnoCentive, Inc., the global leader in Challenge Driven Innovation, and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) today announced a partnership aimed at accelerating environmental innovation in business. The two organizations are seeking companies who will submit “Eco-Challenges” that can be solved through open innovation and crowdsourcing, generating solutions that create business and environmental value.

“For over 20 years, EDF has helped to catalyze environmental innovation through our partnerships with Fortune 500 companies,” said Gwen Ruta, vice president of corporate partnerships for EDF. “Working with InnoCentive, we hope to take it to the next level, building a new model for companies, entrepreneurs and inventors across the globe to come together to quickly solve our most challenging environmental problems.”

The partners will use the unique Challenge Driven Innovation methodology developed by InnoCentive to accelerate open innovation in commercial, nonprofit, and public sector organizations. InnoCentive’s platform brings together cloud-based technology, expert services, and a global network of over 200,000 problem solvers to develop innovative solutions to Challenges submitted by a broad range of organizations. Companies will work with EDF and InnoCentive to identify environmental problems, formulate them as Challenges, and offer financial rewards for the best solutions to the Eco-Challenges.

“EDF is a pioneer in environmental sustainability,” said Dwayne Spradlin, President and CEO of InnoCentive, Inc. “This partnership applies our proven, results-oriented Challenge Driven Innovation approach to the key environmental and sustainability issues facing our world. Organizations today must use every means at their disposal to innovate, especially where human health, prosperity, and our limited natural resources are concerned.”

The partnership between EDF and InnoCentive comes at a crucial time when businesses are endeavoring to tackle environmental problems – in their operations, supply chains, and product usage — while managing resource and budget constraints. The EDF-InnoCentive Eco-Challenge Series will look to identify and solve specific business challenges in the areas of such as energy efficiency, waste production, sustainable foods and products, use of toxic chemicals, and efficient freight transport.

EDF and InnoCentive are seeking companies from a range of industries to work with on developing and hosting Challenges. Companies interested in developing innovative solutions to environmental issues through open R&D and crowdsourcing are invited to participate in the Eco-Challenge Series. Working with EDF and InnoCentive, Challenges submitted by companies can focus on various environmental opportunities throughout the value chain, including:
• Reducing water, energy, chemical or other resource inputs to operations, a supply chain or a distribution network
• Creating innovations in materials or product design
• Reducing impacts associated with the use phase and end of life for products
• Uncovering new technologies, process innovations or business models

Companies interested in presenting a Challenge for this project should contact Justin Olsson at jolsson@edf.org or visit the EDF Business website.

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About InnoCentive
 

InnoCentive is the global leader in Challenge Driven Innovation that bridges the gap between great ideas and actual solutions to drive measureable results. Recognized as an open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer, InnoCentive’s proven methodology, expanding global network of creative and passionate problem solvers, and cloud-based technology platform enable organizations to tap all potential sources of innovation – employees, customers, partners, and InnoCentive’s unmatched Global Solver Community – to accelerate their pace of innovation and evolve into true Challenge Driven Enterprises. Leading commercial, public sector, and non-profit organizations such as Eli Lilly, Medtronic, NASA, nature.com, Procter & Gamble, Roche, Rockefeller Foundation, and The Economist partner with InnoCentive to help them solve their most pressing problems and challenges. For more information, visit www.innocentive.com.

About Environmental Defense Fund
 

Environmental Defense Fund (edf.org), a leading national nonprofit organization, creates transformational solutions to the most serious environmental problems. EDF links science, economics, law and innovative private-sector partnerships. To preserve its independence and to allow for broad adoption of the innovations it catalyzes, EDF does not receive payment or donations from its corporate partners. For more information, visit edfbusiness.org. Read our blog at blogs.edf.org/business. Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/EDFbiz.

For more information contact:

Connie French
InnoCentive
978-482-3300
press@innocentive.com

Jasper Jung
Environmental Defense Fund
202-572-3395
jjung@edf.org