Innovation Exchange

November 25th, 2008 in Innovation platform, by Head Honcho

http://www.innovationexchange.com

Innovation is the “act of introducing new things or methods”. On the other hand, a marketplace is “any sphere considered as a place where ideas, thoughts, artistic creations, etc., compete for recognition”.

Combine three words like open, innovation and marketplace and what do you get? You will have a community of Innovators collaborating to come up with solutions to challenges created by Sponsors – the Global 5000 companies and not-for-profit organizations. This community is called InnovationExchange or IX.

IX provides what is call On-Demand Innovation. This is a new and flexible approach that redefines the meaning of open innovation. IX considers this a breakthrough because of the fact that this approach handles a class of innovation that’s related to business and not science. The good thing about this On-Demand Innovation is that IX offers facilitation on every stage of the process.

Rapid, secure and results-oriented are words that describe the process. Sponsors create challenges. Challenges are made available to the global network of Innovators. Innovators develop solutions. Solutions are review by IX and Sponsor. Success fee is then awarded to submission that meets needs.

As of writing, some current challenges for Innovators include the following:

REWARD: USD$100K
CHALLENGE: Unravel the mystery of consumer behavior for a global food and beverage leader

REWARD: USD$75K
CHALLENGE: Take a leading company’s staple product from the ordinary to the extraordinary

For Innovators to be awarded, they are expected to have submissions having 5 to 10 written pages in length or 12 to 15 presentation slides.

Current competitors of IX for open innovation marketplace include InnoCentive and Philoptima.

The major difference of IX is that it has given real value to collaboration and crowdsourcing - bringing people together and connecting them around compelling priorities. This is attributed to the formation of teams to pool abilities and insights to gain better solutions. IX has used a social networking infrastructure where the team of innovators formed to address a certain challenge becomes the main unit of activity, a sense of community that is lacking in other innovation marketplace.