InnoCentive: Crowdsourcing and Open InnovationInnocentive must be seen as a web community gathering professionals from various horizons (science, design, entrepreneurship etc…) and which make them collaborate to deliver solutions to other professionals in 3 different ways:
A. Challenges: Enables everyone to participate to 4 different challenges:
- The Big Idea Challenge: Help professionals delivering them strong idea concerning a specific demand (creation of a new product line, a new marketing strategy, etc...)
- The Design Challenge: Help professionals who already have the Idea to define it more specifically in order to make it work (description, specifications or requirements definition).
- The Proof Challenge: Help professionals who already have a well defined idea to test it before it becomes actual products.
- The Final Product Challenge: Help professionals to materialize their ideas and prototypes thanks to the professional network (search for suppliers, partners, etc...)
B. ONRAMP: Services delivered by professional from the InnoCentive Company and which gather all the four challenges above.
C. InnoCentive@Work: Creation of web community inside the seeker company in order to help it solve its problem internally and faster.
InnoCentive as a win-win solution:
Thanks to the Open Innovation, InnoCentive is a problem solver for all its stakeholders, from customers to the business owners:A. Customers: referred in InnoCentive as Seekers.
- Gain of time.
- Save money (Challenges: the Seeker pays an award to the winning Solver only if the Challenge is solved).
- Find the solutions to every problem they can have.
- Assurance the solution will work (thanks to prototypes and tests for example).
- Can find from specific solutions to more global assistance throughout the Idea process.
- Solve Internal communication problem (thanks to InnoCentive@Work).
B. Suppliers: referred in InnoCentive as Solvers.
- Can work when they want
- Can choose the problem they want to solve
- Can work from home
- Gain of time,
- Gain of energy
- Can win up to 1, 000, 000 $ prize.
- Can develop their creativity
C. Partners: professionals who work for InnoCentive
- Huge range of problem to work on
- Target a wider potential clientele (thanks to the Final Product Challenge seekers are directly in touch with suppliers/ partners for further collaboration)
D. Business Owners
- Gain of time
- Nothing much to do with the problem solving part of the business
- Reach a wide range of people
- Creation of a business model which can last in the long run
Innocentive gathers two types of professionals looking for solutions: the corporate and the non-for-profit organizations.
The difference between the two is that corporates need to pay subscriptions to send their problems. They also have to pay reward to the seekers who offer the best solution to their problem.
Thanks to collaboration with the Rockefeller and InnoCentive, the Non-for-profit organizations do not have to pay any registration fee to put send their problem and receive solutions to them.
The main revenue source of InnoCentive is definitely the registration fees paid by the corporate.
Thanks to the prize-based principle of the company, InnoCentive can get a commission on every reward paid by the seekers to the solvers.
The company also offers other remunerated services in consultancy such as Open iNnovation Rapid Adoption Methods and Practices and InnoCentive@Work to corporates.
Although InnoCentive seems to be the leader in the web market, it also faces competitors such as Avantium which is a company specialized in high-throughput experimentation. It offers services in R/D for companies facing problem in the energy, chemicals and pharmaceutical industries.
We can also take a look at A Swarm of Angels which is not a competitor of InnoCentive but a movie based on the same principle of crowdsourcing and Open Innovation.
A Swarm of Angels is a movie project which will be licensed by Creative Commons.
Matt Hanson’s wish, who is a movie critic and who first thought of the project, is to gather 50 000 members. These members would have to contribute to the project with £25 each.The choice of the scenario and the direction of the movie will be done by the community.
The Open Innovation model is definitely the kind of model which could not apply offline. The main reason to this fact is that it is impossible to create a community important enough for a company based on the model to build credibility. Plus, the model is also based on the rapidity of finding solutions which can also be found thanks to the Internet.
We can say the Open Innovation model is sustainable since corporates and organizations in general tend to look for unique, fast solution to their problem.
Businesses such as InnoCentive create community with creative thinkers from all over the world and from all industries. To my opinion we will see more and more businesses based on this model flourishing on the internet in the next years or even months.
To face the future competitors, InnoCentive will need to increase its market share. If we take a look at the website http://portail-innovation.typepad.com/innovationtribune/2005/12/innocentive.html, we can see that the solvers are mainly from the United States, and Germany. The business might not be known enough to generate seekers from other countries in the world. By translating the website in other languages and by developing a marketing strategy in the other countries, the business will be more accessible to other professionals.
Moreover, even if InnoCentive covers a wide range of industries, it can always develop new ones.
In order to create new revenue sources, InnoCentive should widen its consultancy services, maybe offer e-learning services and why not creating schools or studying program about innovative thinking, since, as seen in our course, everybody can learn how to think differently?
