InnoCentive Expands Open Innovation Operations to Europe

InnoCentive is now part of Wazoku

WALTHAM, Mass. – January 19, 2010 – InnoCentive, Inc., the world leader in open innovation, today announced the opening of a new office in Munich, Germany.  With a staff of professionals actively focused on supporting European clients and driving new business opportunities, InnoCentive looks to soon make additional hires to further support its European client base.

InnoCentive is a global company that works with commercial, not for profit, and government organizations requiring rapid access to break through innovation.  InnoCentive uses social media and the internet to directly connect critical problems to its global Solver community of more than 200,000 researchers, engineers, product designers, and others, representing more than 200 countries. Through new products, InnoCentive is also able to efficiently tap a company’s employees and retirees. Through partners like Nature and SAP, these problems reach an estimated 4 million potential Solvers worldwide. Overall, mission critical problems are solved more than 50 percent of the time through InnoCentive’s network.

“In recent years we’ve seen rapid adoption of open innovation and our services specifically across Europe, surpassing other areas of the world,” said Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of InnoCentive“With nearly a third of our clients headquartered in Europe and many more who are large U.S.-based Seekers with European operations, it was time to open our first European location. We selected Munich, because it is at the epicenter of our European customer base and we will continue to invest in our European presence. Eventually we would like to see Germany recognized as a center for open innovation in Europe.”

European companies lend themselves particularly well to adopting the open innovation model due to the collaborative and multinational foundation of countries and firms in the European Union. Further, the global economic crisis has forced organizations everywhere to rethink how they innovate- requiring them to use every tool at their disposal. One of InnoCentive’s newest products,InnoCentive@Work, is particularly well suited to this market.

InnoCentive@Work is an internal social media platform that connects global locations for European companies to foster global collaboration within the enterprise and/or between partners. Providing an internal Web-based community that allows employees to see and securely collaborate on each other’s proposed solutions, InnoCentive@Work bridges the silos within organizations requiring greater innovation efficiencies. Coupled with access to InnoCentive’s global Solver community, this offering is critical for European organizations seeking to tap open innovation for competitive advantage.

A recent commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of InnoCentive confirmed that global consumer goods company SCA achieved a Return on Investment (ROI) of 74 percent with payback in less than three months as a result of posting innovation Challenges to the InnoCentive Global Marketplace. The complete Forrester Consulting study, titled “The Total Economic Impact of InnoCentive Challenges,” is available to download at no cost.

InnoCentive’s new office is located at Maximilianstrasse 35a, D-80539 in Munich, Germany. Sales contact: Georg DeBus, sales and business development manager, InnoCentive Inc., gdebus@InnoCentive.com.

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/

Press contact:

Karyn Martin
Emerge PR
617-729-3173
kmartin@emergepr.com
press@innocentive.com