FdP Weblog

innovation light

I told you in my recent posts about my strong belief that social networks can effectively help Small and Medium enterprises to develop their products and solve specific business and organizational problems/challenges, thus filling the void created by the failure of the academic and scientific research world to meet these needs.

The main sources of this  belief are Chesbrough, who five years ago (in the book “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology“) coined the concept of open innovation and obviously Tapscott/Williams, the  outstanding authors of Wikinomics.

Now I’ve recently discovered innocentive.com a virtual platform of ideas and technologies where seekers and solvers are free to meet and exchange value.

Many European and American SMEs have got the habit to use this platform as their virtual R&D. Adhering to the open innovation paradygm these companies have learnt that involving other parties outside their boundaries, when developing new products and technologies, can be of great added value. On this platform they can find the best mix of experts in a wide range of subjects, from Organic, Polymer, Synthetic Chemistry to Artificial Intelligence, Bioinformatics, Bioengineering, Civil Engineering, Electronics, Biology, Medicine, Pharmacology, Game Theory, Modeling/Optimization, Operations, etc…………………… and develop with them open and flexible cooperations.

The principle by which Innocentive works is pretty smart and simple. As you can find in the Innocentive website, “Using InnoCentive’s Web 2.0 platform, a “Seeker” organization posts a “Challenge” – a problem for which it seeks a breakthrough solution – to the InnoCentive Marketplace and commits to pay a successful “Solver” a cash award. InnoCentive Seekers benefit from a “pay for performance” low-risk environment where they only pay for solutions they accept. The not-for-profit Seeker organization posts its R&D Challenge on Innocentive’s website along with an appropriate award. Innocentive’s Solvers submit solutions to the challenge. The Seeker pays an award to the winning Solver only if the Challenge is solved“

Don’t you think this is absolutely original and inspiring?