InnoCentive Announces Next Generation Crowdsourcing Platform

InnoCentive is now part of Wazoku

WALTHAM, Mass. – June 15, 2010 – InnoCentive, Inc., the world leader in open innovation, today announced that it has launched InnoCentive@Work 3, the third generation of its @Work enterprise platform for collaborative, Challenge-driven innovation during this week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference being held in Boston. The product extends clients’ ability to solve critical business and technical problems by tapping the diverse thinking of communities both inside and outside of a company.

“To compete in today’s economy, companies must find ways to innovate faster with their current resources,” said David Ritter, CTO of InnoCentive. “Open innovation is now an essential core capability. This product allows organizations to utilize the power of diverse knowledge and collaboration to solve important business challenges— regardless of where solutions are hiding within the company or in its broader ecosystem.”

InnoCentive@Work is a comprehensive suite of tools and services that help organizations create and leverage Web-based collaborative communities for problem solving. Unlike “idea management” or “social networking” products, InnoCentive@Work applies InnoCentive’s proven Challenge methodology to drive innovation with measurable business results.

InnoCentive@Work was developed in close collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company and other enterprise clients. According to Bret E. Huff, vice president, chemical PR&D at Lilly, “InnoCentive@Work has already had tremendous impact at Lilly. With well over 100 Challenges run inside the firm, 80 percent of the important problems posted through the system have been at least partially solved. In many cases, people with backgrounds or roles outside of the specific problem area have made insightful contributions to the solution. With the increased flexibility of InnoCentive@Work version three, we expect to engage even more broadly with external communities such as consultants and partners to fuel innovation.”

The new InnoCentive@Work offering was developed for companies that wish to more effectively tap the talent and insight already present in their employees, partners, and customers. InnoCentive@Work has the unique ability to present each critical problem to a variety of communities that may provide a solution. With each community of potential Solvers, InnoCentive@Work increases the likelihood of finding breakthrough solutions by adapting to the community’s optimal style of working and collaborating.

The product also provides a logical first step toward true open innovation. New features include:

Private Pavilions — Allowing customers the ability to extend the use of @Work beyond their corporate walls to non-employees or a pre-defined group of Solvers who may be employees, contractors, retirees, alumni, academics and other company invited guests. This feature is unique to InnoCentive and not available through other innovation platforms.

Adaptive Voting and Rating — For each Challenge, voting can be configured to capture the feedback of the problem solving community in the way most appropriate to the community. Unlike other systems, voting in InnoCentive@Work offers flexible options that adapt to the way the group wishes to collaborate— including the ability to limit the visibility of voting to subsets of users.

Search — All content within InnoCentive@Work is fully indexed—Challenge content, solutions, and collaborative discussions—and accessible through a simple but powerful faceted search tool. The accumulated set of Challenges and solutions can quickly become a client’s most valuable knowledge asset.

Additional features within the third generation InnoCentive@Work product include:

• Fully threaded discussions — Collaboration occurs in a natural discussion flow, with problem solver contributing and building on each other’s solutions. “Nested comments” help preserve the context of the discussion among users.
• Fully Integrated Awards Process — The owner of a Challenge easily assigns points directly to the relevant discussion posts then publishes the results, giving immediate feedback to the problem solvers. The award process also captures key metrics that capture and document the value created through each Challenge.
• Community Management — Administrators control the creation of groups of users, allowing full control over the audience for each Challenge. Separate groups can be established including internal employees, external partners, or a combination of problem solvers from both inside and outside the firm.

InnoCentive@Work complements SharePoint implementations and can integrate with existing platforms to make them work better for an organization, resulting in measurable ROI in a matter of months, not years.

Pricing and Availability

InnoCentive@Work 3 is available immediately and has been automatically updated to existing users. For new customers, pricing includes a one-time implementation charge and monthly subscription fee. Training and services are fully integrated with the product to ensure that the platform creates impact.

About InnoCentive, Inc.

Since 2001, InnoCentive has helped corporate, government, and non-profit organizations to better innovate through crowdsourcing, strategic consulting services and internal Software-as-a-Service offerings. The company built the first global Web community for open innovation where organizations or “Seekers” submit complex problems or “Challenges” for resolution to a “Solver” community of more than 200,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, business professionals, and research organizations in more than 200 countries. Prizes for winning solutions are financial awards up to US $1,000,000. Committed to unleashing diverse thinking, InnoCentive continues to introduce new products and services exemplifying a new corporate model where return to investors and individual passion go hand in hand with solving mankind’s most pressing problems. https://www.innocentive.com/

Karyn Martin
Emerge PR for InnoCentive
kmartin@emergepr.com
617-729-3173

Connie French
InnoCentive Marketing Director
press@innocentive.com

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June 15, 2010