InnoCentive
| Private company | |
| Industry | Crowdsourcing, Cloud Labor, Open innovation, R & D, innovation management, product development |
| Founded | Indianapolis, Indiana (2001) |
| Headquarters | Waltham, Massachusetts, US |
Key people |
|
| Products | Innovation management, inducement prize contest, crowdsourcing, open innovation |
| Website |
InnoCentive.com http://www.innocentive.com/ |
InnoCentive is a Waltham, Massachusetts-based crowdsourcing company that accepts by commission research and development problems in engineering, computer science, math, chemistry, life sciences, physical sciences and business. The company frames these as "challenge problems" for anyone to solve. It gives cash awards for the best solutions to solvers who meet the challenge criteria. However the company has a history of not being able to make good on its promise to deliver evaluation results to solvers in two to six months. In August 2017, Innocentive's website Challenges section was showing several challenges dating from 2015 and 2016 stuck in the Evaluation stage, and in some cases, more than twenty months had passed since the solution submission deadline. The company doesn't seem to have an effective mechanism to compel "Seekers" to make good on their promise to pay an award to solvers, even in the case of challenges with Guaranteed Award as evidenced by the "Crack Repair of Difficult to Weld Materials" challenge opened in October 2015 and still under Evaluation in August 2017. It is therefore up to Solvers to estimate their chances of winning an award not only based on their own skills but also on Innocentive's ability to obtain payment from the Seeker company, and understand that their effort may not be rewarded in a timely manner, if at all. [1]
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.[2]
In February 2012, InnoCentive acquired UK-based OmniCompete.[3]
Company
InnoCentive is a privately held, venture-backed firm headquartered near Boston in Waltham, Massachusetts, with a European office in London, UK. The company posts "Challenges" to its "Global Solver Community" in addition to internal Challenges—those targeted at private communities like employees, customers and suppliers.
InnoCentive's solver community consists of over 355,000 people from nearly 200 countries,[4]
User base
As of January 2014, there was a total of 355,000 users from nearly 200 countries. Aside from traditional science PhDs, the user group includes technicians, students and engineers. Nevertheless, only 200 to 600 solvers register as solvers for any given challenge. Of those registered users, only approximately up to 33% submit solutions, and according to Innocentive's principals only a third of those are worthy of submission to the project sponsor, known as the Seeker. According to Principals, solvers are successful in finding solution approximately 66% of the time, as reported on LinkedIn Solver Group discussion. The small percentage of active participants compared to total number of users (1 out of 1,000) can be attributed to the fact that most employed skilled workers are prevented from sharing their specialized knowledge with third parties by their employers, or under obligation to direct the majority of their prize to their institutions in the case of U.S. Academia, or do not have enough free time outside work to undertake a time-consuming challenge with no certainty of a reward. In the two first cases, a loophole exists since employers are not directly notified and winning solvers can choose to remain anonymous. More than 50% of registered solvers come from Russia, India, and China. Most of the problem solvers are well-educated, with a majority (65.8%) holding a PhD. InnoCentive has also signed agreements with the Chinese and Russian national science academies. As motivation for Russian universities, for example, a solver’s academic department can get 10% of any award.[5]
See also
References
- ↑ "Prizes for Solutions to Problems Play Valuable Role in Innovation" Wall Street Journal, 25 January 2007. Retrieved 12 March 2007.
- ↑ "Accelerating Innovation for Development: The Rockefeller Foundation and Inno-Centive Renew Partnership Linking Nonprofit Organizations to World-Class Scientific Thinkers". Rockefeller Foundation. 23 June 2009. Retrieved 29 September 2014.
- ↑ "InnoCentive Acquires OmniCompete Limited". InnoCentive. 6 February 2012.
- ↑ Lehrer, Jonah (2012). Imagine: How Creativity Works. Boston / New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 120. ISBN 978-0-547-38607-2.
- ↑ Travis, John (28 March 2008). "Science and Commerce: Science by the Masses". Science. 319 (5871): 1750–1752. PMID 18369115. doi:10.1126/science.319.5871.1750.