Open innovation firm InnoCentive has announced a major new partnership with U.K. idea management scaleup Wazoku, which will create the world’s most comprehensive and powerful innovation platform and community.
Wazoku’s Idea Spotlight innovation platform will be integrated with InnoCentive’s global network of more than 400,000 expert problem «solvers» and Challenge Driven Innovation™ methodology.
The joint offering is thought to be the world’s biggest innovation community and broadest innovation offering, allowing the crowdsourcing of solutions to the most pressing of business and technological challenges anywhere, anytime.
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«We see a lot of demand from our customers for a more integrated offering, enabling open innovation challenges, while also supporting internal and ecosystem focused innovation,» said Alpheus Bingham, CEO and co-founder of InnoCentive. «Wazoku’s platform is feature-rich, inherently scalable and has already proved its commercial viability and effectiveness. It will add a new dimension to our challenges and, together, we create an open innovation platform, community and marketplace unlike any other in the world.»
InnoCentive customers will benefit from a platform partner that brings a richer and broader suite of features and functionality. Wazoku’s innovation platform Idea Spotlight is regarded as one of the most advanced in the innovation sector and is used by organizations such as the Ministry of Defence, National Health Service and HSBC to capture, evaluate, improve and implement ideas from employees, customers, partners and other groups of stakeholders.
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«Wazoku is always looking for ways of bringing new ideas to the market and, with this partnership, we can offer a solution at a scope and scale that no other company can,» said Simon Hill, CEO, Wazoku. «Our Idea Spotlight platform is widely recognised by analysts, customers and peers for its rate of product innovation and, by combining that with InnoCentive’s solver network, we have created a unique proposition for problem-solving and crowdsourcing ideas.»
Initially, the partnership will see the integration of Wazoku’s Idea Spotlight with InnoCentive’s external network of more than 400,000 solvers and its Challenge Driven Innovation™ methodology. Following this, the two companies will develop the Wazoku «Spotlight.ai» functionality, adding more AI and machine learning to the open innovation offering to help global businesses more effectively source, evaluate and identify the best outcomes to address their innovation challenges.
Dr. Thomas Malone, Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, sees the partnership as the natural progression of open innovation: «Integrating the components of idea management and crowdsourcing allows companies to solve problems and create opportunities using many channels both outside and inside the organization. This combination of market leaders, InnoCentive and Wazoku, represents a substantial maturation in the open innovation sector.»
For Wazoku, the partnership with InnoCentive also provides a further footprint into the important U.S. market, as Simon Hill, CEO, Wazoku, explains:
«The global idea management market will reach more than £1 billion within two years and a significant part of that is within the U.S. It’s a key market for Wazoku and partnering with InnoCentive is the perfect way for us to make more significant inroads into the U.S. and attract new customers.»
For further information about InnoCentive, please visit https://www.innocentive.com/.
For further information about Wazoku, please visit https://www.wazoku.com.
Image: Pixabay
SOURCE: InnoCentive , Feb 11, 2020
https://www.innocentive.com