Wazoku Crowd

Overview

The Wazoku Crowd allows organizations to step outside your current limits to both discover new opportunities and solve existing problems. These millions of problem solvers break down industry, location, and language boundaries.

We’re the world’s first open talent crowd to receive the prestigious accreditation from the Center for Transformation of Work (CTW). That means that the CTW believes we are leading the charge for their strategic aims to transform the world of work for 1 billion people by 2025.

We’ve awarded $60m+ to Solvers over 20 years for their ideas, insights, and expertise. Join today and use your experience to change the world – wherever and whenever suits you.

Why Should You Join Wazoku Crowd?

Wazoku has a proven track record of delivering solutions to the world’s biggest problems. Our success rate on external innovation Challenges is over 80% across a 20-year period. We’ve run 2,500+ Challenges and counting, and have captured 200,000+ innovations for our clients.

These aren’t just impractical ideas, either: each solution is specifically awarded based on its ability to solve the problem itself.

This Collective Intelligence approach is as close to risk-free as using ideas from the outside can be: with fully set IP permissions our Seekers either license or own the ideas that come out of them.

By posting real and meaningful incentives, Solvers become dependable experts and people who can make a genuine difference to the future of your business.

Key Features

A new perspective – successful Solvers often don't fit traditional hiring profiles but are just as capable for solving the problem. We offer our Solvers regular and exciting Challenges, with both financial and collaboration awards, from some of the world's most innovative organizations.

Extended capability problem solving to meet deadlines often takes up a lot of a team’s time, but the Solvers in the Wazoku Challenge Community offer an extended capability. For NASA, we delivered solutions from 3,000 Solvers who contributed a total of 82 working months to the problem at hand – that’s 5,840 hours of work that they only had to pay a single, fixed award amount for!

Always-on – because our growing Challenge Community spans 195+ countries and millions of Change Makers, your problem can be worked on day and night.

Across industry boundaries – when your team or organization works on a problem or opportunity, you naturally see it through existing lenses, industry contexts, and assumed constraints. Using external innovation allows you to step outside the box and explore a different way of solving.

Ever-expanding – the Wazoku Crowd is populated with creative and intelligent problem solvers who can provide critical value to your organization. The best news is: our crowd is growing every day. In 2022 alone we’ve added Solvers from MIT’s innovation community, 6,000+ expert immunologists through The Geneva Learning Foundation, and access to 2m+ UK-based students with JISC.

Secure – the Innovation_360 platform is enterprise secure and has customizable and controlled IP agreements to ensure that whatever solutions come out of your external innovation belong to you.

Why Use Wazoku for External Innovation?

Wazoku has twenty years of direct experience in facilitating solutions for companies through crowdsourcing on a global scale. Our connected communities, co-creation capability, and the Wazoku Crowd community of millions of proven problem solvers set us as the gold-standard for external innovation.

We offer you the chance to access ideas from outside your network all in one place. You can manage IP agreements, award amounts, and the implementation of solutions through one platform: Innovation_360. Streamlining innovation practices in this way better positions all of our customers to deliver better results and innovate at scale.

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.

Using external innovation build consistent and replicable value where previous one-off lightbulb moments only papered over the cracks.

Don't just take our word for it:

Whatever Your Needs or Industry

External innovation provides critical value for your organization regardless of your need, size, or industry. We’ve worked successfully for twenty years with customers from across the innovation maturity pipeline and have a proven track record delivering sustainable and scalable results for our clients.

Wazoku can help, whether you plan to use Wazoku Crowd as a force multiplier to existing capabilities, as a one-off solution to a problem, or as part of an ongoing cultural shift. Our Customer Success and Challenge Design teams work in tandem with you: to ensure a successful solution is delivered.

We’ve worked with businesses of all sizes across industry boundaries such as financial institutions, engineering firms, water and energy operators, not-for-profits, and many more. Read more about our success through our Customer Stories.

Solutions found through the Wazoku Crowd don’t always take the form of a pre-packaged idea: they can come in a collaboration agreement, contact for future opportunities, or a tested hypothesis for you to build on.

Award amounts and the type of awards can also change depending on your needs. For instance, with GlaxoSmithKline, a relatively-low award amount for the Pharma industry saw the delivery of 66 possible solutions that advanced research. The new scientific proof-of-principle that resulted from the Challenge has a much larger financial impact than just the $5,000 award.

Getting Started

Whether you’re looking to learn more about scaling your external innovation, are ready to book a consultation to run a Challenge, or want to ask us a question about the Wazoku Challenge Community, 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 external innovation journey today!