Innovation_360 by Wazoku

Meet your global home for innovation built upon the AI powered, Wazoku Platform. Seamlessly connect your innovation initiatives from insight to impact and from idea to invoice, turning your organization, suppliers, and the global collective intelligence of the Wazoku Crowd into your innovation lab.

Innovation at Scale

Innovation_360 supports your ability to innovate, regardless of the type of problem you have. The platform has been used by organizations to solve their most pressing sustainability issues, drive digital transformation, discover new uses for existing technology, and disrupt the market with new offerings.

One Platform for all your needs

The tools you need to accelerate innovation outcomes across your business. Build a true culture of innovation throughout your entire organization, drive collaborative innovation through co-creation with partners or SMEs, or turn the whole world into your R&D lab with the Wazoku Crowd.

Headquarters for your innovation data

Finally, all your innovation data in one place. Make smarter bets, run better experiments, fail faster, and succeed at scale. Innovation_360 is your Innovation Operating System that brings together all of your relevant activities and data in one place, giving you the global view required to manage and sustainably deliver innovation success from idea to impact.

Overview

The need for a business to transform how it operates has never been greater. A shifting business landscape requires action: whether it’s the need to reduce costs, improve sustainability, deploy new technologies, or harness a globalized talent pool. However, organizations struggle to change because of poor visibility over innovation efforts. Without a global home for innovation, the process of acting upon your data remains slow, disconnected, and sub-scale.

Innovation_360 lets you start managing your innovation activities quickly and simply, with a transparent and empowering platform. You can immediately build on engagement and collaboration to deliver lower costs, reduced time from idea to impact, and increased success rates. When using the purpose-built, AI powered, Wazoku Platform, you’re building a positive innovation culture through celebrating good ideas and where they came from. No matter your current or future needs, you can continue innovating – safe in the knowledge that our offering can scale when you need to. With an innovation management platform that’s enterprise secure and integrated with all of your systems, it’s no wonder that our customers say we’re “where innovation works.”

Wazoku helps the world’s largest and most creative businesses to successfully innovate at scale. Our Innovation_360 platform is comprehensive and gives you the capacity to make problem-solving, innovating, and exploring opportunities quicker and easier than ever before. The platform has a rich set of integrated features including: AI-powered automation, advanced analytics, tech scouting, insights from the Wazoku Crowd of millions of global problem solvers, and access to connected communities for your internal and external collaboration.

What Innovation_360 gives you

By bringing together all of your innovation activities under one roof, Innovation_360 gives you the ability to sustainably deliver innovation success. In collecting and pooling all relevant data, information, and external insights in one view, you’re equipped with the platform to supercharge your innovation outcomes. Innovation_360 brings together a number of modules that support your innovation work, from idea to impact.

For companies across the globe, innovation has become a key capability through Innovation_360’s ability to slash costs and forge the best connections.

Our Challenge Driven Innovation® 4D process

• In the Discover phase you research and gather insights through trend scouting, strategic foresight and analytics, signalling to spot potential drivers of change, new trends, emerging technologies, start-ups, and other early signals in real-time.
• In the Define phase you are looking to really understand the innovation problem or opportunity you are seeking to address and to prioritise this against the other priorities, strategic focus areas and more across the business. This is powered by our proven Challenge Driven Innovation® methodology and analytics capabilities.
• In the Develop phase you further refining the roadmap, designing the challenge(s), identifying the relevant audience(s), setting the success criteria and decision-making frameworks. Moving from prototyping to production
• In the Deliver phase you move rapidly through the delivery stages into scaled production and continuous improvement and optimisation.

Why do you need an operating system for innovation?

For many large, established organizations (LEOs), innovation has often been an exercise that starts with a top-down directive and ends in underwhelming results. One of the biggest challenges is that LEOs are set up to be risk-averse and change-resistant. We refer to this as The Corporate Immune System, which rejects innovation as the immune system would a virus. LEOs are change-resistant by design.

It doesn’t have to stay that way. By investing in a system that enables you to consistently identify and prioritise both problems & opportunities within your current operations and future opportunities, you can turn “because that’s how we’ve always done it” into a thing of the past. Whether it’s searching for ways to improve your processes, tackling sustainability challenges head on, or refining your customer experience – an innovation operating system can support it all.

Enterprise Ready

Secure – combining enterprise-class security features with comprehensive audits, systems, and networks to ensure client and business data is always protected.

Scalable – supports both internal and external innovation from a single team, your entire business, or through your whole supply chain and beyond.

Connected – Innovation_360’s connected communities give you dedicated spaces to share, discuss, and accelerate ideas into real world value. Our advanced analytics makes sure nothing falls between the cracks as you grow, with:

• a comprehensive view of your innovation activities
• industry-leading idea management that provides you with the capability to create a living library of ideas

Integrated – seamlessly linked through the enterprise stack to support innovation work and decision-making across the value chain (e.g. ESNs, PM, ERP, etc). Alongside Microsoft Teams and Jira integrations, our platform can go toe-to-toe with any corporate channels: insurance firm AlteLeipziger reported that they communicated on our platform far more than on their Yammer, Slack, Teams, or other channels.

Wazoku Crowd – accelerate your innovation from idea to impact through:

• Our global crowd of millions of proven problem solvers, who create infinite capacity to explore opportunities and address your issues
• Searchable tech or IP solutions from global start-ups, SMEs, and academic institutions
• Connecting you with industry-leading innovation consultancies and specialist start-ups
• A Solver community hub where asking and answering valuable questions is social, intuitive, and effective

Key Features of Innovation_360

Innovation Academy

As part of our mission to help our customers create sustainable, scalable innovation systems, we have created the Innovation Academy. These are training programs for your employees to learn the practical skills needed to drive change across your organization.

We provide a mix of virtual and in-person training sessions to impart your Champions – people committed to solve problems and generate ideas – with the best practices from our 20 years in innovation.

Champions will be able to identify pain-points that can be run as crowdsourced questions to our millions of global Change Makers. They’ll be taught how sort and prioritize internal problems, so your business is focused on the right ones at the right time – increasing your chances of success. Those who complete the program will be able to support idea generation, development, and evaluation to embed the lessons from the program across the business.

Advanced Analytics

The Wazoku Platform provides hands-on access to your innovation data. Your team can easily surface the right metrics to make informed decisions on your organization’s future. Accessing and actively using this data enables better decisions for innovation investment of both time and resources.

By coupling best practice data with configurable widgets and dashboards, Innovation_360 gives you eyes on the engagement, activity, and time spent on your innovation.

Our best-in-class data visualization and report builders mean that you can harness your innovation information and seamlessly create visuals to export.

With analytics that’s personalized to each user’s view and an API functionality for organizational reporting, your team can now utilize the most cohesive innovation analytics.

Why choose Wazoku’s Innovation_360?

For many of our customers, innovation was a corporate directive that was disconnected, decentralized, and demanding time and effort to see any results. When innovation and idea management worked it was usually in isolated lightbulb moments, one-off solutions that would paper over the cracks of wider problems.

Teams and organizations can now be empowered by Innovation_360: where you can quickly convert ideas into real impacts. The connections, data, and user experience on our platform gives you the means to innovate quicker and at lower costs.

No matter your industry, team, or product need, Innovation_360 can supercharge every aspect of your innovation – allowing you to start quickly, achieve results at lower costs, and explore opportunities and solve problems simultaneously.

Are you curious about how to transform your innovation into an always-on capability? Read our Innovation At Scale report to learn the easy steps to innovate across your business and beyond!

No Matter Your Needs or Industry

When you’re facing a problem or exploring an opportunity, becoming more efficient has results that will snowball throughout your entire organization. No matter the reasons for your innovation, Wazoku has 20 years of experience in driving real value from ideas across internal, external, and crowdsourced projects for our customers.

We’ve worked with global banking giants like HSBC and Barclays to develop their connected communities, aided the US Navy and NASA by providing crowdsourced solutions to their biggest problems, and provided a platform to supercharge vaccine recovery in the wake of COVID-19 for The Geneva Learning Foundation. These organizations all face a multitude of different problems, in industries that have their own unique difficulties and contexts to address.

Your organization will gain the advantages of reduced costs, faster speeds from idea to impact, and a greater network of collaboration which has benefits that will last long after your initial plans.

Our results are displayed across organizations of different sizes, too. Old Mutual, a pan-African financial services organization with over 14 million customers, utilized us to transform innovation and idea management in one business unit. For Multiconsult, a leading Scandinavian firm of consulting engineers, architects, and designers, Wazoku powers a platform for idea collection across 3,200 employees.

We’ve turned $15,000 award amounts for Solvers into impacts that give millions in recurring savings for organizations across retail, pharma, energy, and more.

Why Wazoku?

No matter your issue, Innovation_360 gives you the tools to discuss and solve it internally, work with your external supply chain or customers, or ask a brilliant, capable crowd for their insights. Our twenty years of experience in internal innovation programs and idea management mean that we can help your organization no matter the size, scale, or scope of your challenge or opportunity.

Our Challenge Driven Innovation® methodology has a track record of radically improving the outcomes our customers achieve. By bringing focus and a dedicated process, the framework ensures that every part of your innovation work is considered, and nothing gets left behind. The framework keeps your innovation project on schedule and is geared towards delivering solutions which are closely aligned to your needs and objectives.

We offer the industry gold standard for crowdsourcing, with a global community of open talent from 195 countries that grows bigger by the day. In 2022 alone, we’ve added another 100,000 Solvers from MIT’s problem-solving lab, 6,000 immunologists through The Geneva Learning Foundation’s network, and put organization’s pressing problems in front of 2m+ UK-based students.

The capability of the Wazoku Crowd isn’t only based on their one-time solutions to a Challenge. Our Solvers often bring with them knowledge and industry contacts developed through years of experience in a specific field. Whether you’re looking for a one-off answer or a collaborative research partnership, our Challenge types allow you to customize what you’re searching for and set IP agreements to ensure that work belongs to you.

• 70% of our crowd’s solutions come from industries outside of the problem’s type.
• 182% ROI when using open innovation.
• 3 years lost on a problem to a solution in 3 months - We provided the answer to a Kevlar problem that NASA was stuck on – from asking the question to a fully-owned solution in just 3 months.
• 20 years after a disaster - One of our Solvers helped to support and speed up recovery efforts twenty years after an oil spill in the Prince William Sound, Alaska. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute (OSRI) posted a Challenge on Wazoku and the Solver used their experience in construction to solve how to keep oil viscous on transport ships: making the cleaning transport ships more efficient. Read more about how utilizing external innovation revolutionized and sped up recovery twenty years after an oil spill.

Getting Started

Whether you’re looking to learn more about scaling your innovation activities, are ready to book a demo session, or want to ask us a question about Innovation_360, it all starts with getting in touch.

Our friendly and expert team would love the chance to talk you through everything. You can learn more about us by meeting the team or see evidence of how we continue to deliver success for our clients across every industry by browsing our Customer Stories.

Let’s change the world, one idea at a time. Start your innovation journey today!