Bayer Crop Science

Why did The Climate Corporation run this Challenge?

Through tools and insights, farmers can learn where to apply herbicides or pesticides more precisely, know which fields are more or less at risk from pH changes, and better plan watering schedules. In order to power these tools, the team needed the data for 10 countries in Europe and South Africa – but even finding or getting access to this data can be its own problem.

Bringing different data layers and sets together would allow for smarter, modern farming: so The Climate Corporation asked the Wazoku Crowd for information around soil around the world. Georeferenced soil databases and elevation models could then be used at the field and subfield scale levels to help the business’ grower customers. Using an Ideation Challenge ensured that there would be a guaranteed award for at least one submitted solution, and that The Climate Corporation could use all solutions with a non-exclusive license.

Phil Taylor, Director of Open Innovation and Outreach at Bayer, is convinced that the next great innovation in agriculture will come from someone who does not think about agriculture at all. This belief in the power of adjacent innovations from tangential fields or even from somewhere else entirely is where the Wazoku Crowd thrives. By framing this question in this way, Solvers from all around the world could resonate and engage with Bayer’s problem: bringing in insights from medical fields, aerospace, engineering, and more.

Running this Challenge helped to overcome their information gap that they could not fill with internal resource, information, or publicly-available information.

The solutions and the role of Wazoku

Bayer have the largest R&D organization in their industry but still realized that their teams cannot do everything internally or by themselves. Using open innovation with Wazoku helped them to act more agilely, tap into the scale and depth of expertise outside their business, and used the insights to adopt the next great technologies and opportunities.

At one point in Monsanto, the legacy company before Bayer’s acquisition and rebranding into The Climate Corporation, every product on their list had an element of technology from outside the company. It is very much in Bayer’s DNA that external partnering and interactions are critical to success. Wazoku is a key part of The Climate Corporation’s open innovation strategy, with the Wazoku Platform and an ability to address a question that the team could not answer internally.

In framing the Challenge question to be run to the crowd, Wazoku helped Bayer Crop Science and The Climate Corporation stakeholders to establish:

• What the teams were missing
• What expertise the Wazoku Crowd holds
• How to phrase the question and Challenge statement to best generate solutions

The entire process took six months from end to end and the $10,000 USD award was split between two solutions.

In the webinar around ‘The Skin of The Earth’ Challenge’s success, the Bayer team agreed that it would have taken a lot longer and cost a lot more to find the solutions to this problem any other way.

Find out more by watching the webinar below: