Welcome to an update in July 2024 of what proved to be a popular article looking at some great open innovation platforms. Innovation is crucial to survive in today’s disruptive and fast moving industrial and commercial landscape. Back in 2017 it was predicted that digital disruption would wipe out at least 40% of businesses in the next decade if they didn’t adopt new technology, which usually also means new methods and requires a different management mindset. Global corporations recognize risks of ignoring new technology, though many decision-makers fail to boost R&D with open innovation platforms. They don’t know how to use open innovation to find company-wide solutions or breakthroughs, or how to achieve a longingly hoped-for “agility at scale.” The examples of crowdsourcing open innovation in this article will help them.
Open innovation technology and techniques, and specific innovation management software, help companies overcome these difficulties, offering an efficient way for new ideas to be collected, refined, implemented, and monitored in order to generate a quick ROI. These inputs can be solicited from employees, customers, social media followers, even the general public at large. There is a range of service and software providers gaining more and more experience in guiding businesses through the processes of leveraging external networks. This can include accessing specialist skills and flexibly scaling resources according to project pipeline demand. Here, we take a look at ten of the top open innovation platforms.
Where a client name is highlighted it is linked to a case study of how they benefited from using open innovation.
HeroX
HeroX was co-founded in 2013 by serial entrepreneur Christian Cotichini and XPRIZE founder and futurist Peter Diamandis. HeroX helps organisations solve any challenge in any field by using the power of their crowd combined with a turn-key, easy to use platform. They make crowdsourcing simple and easy, with a 90% success rate.
The sponsoring organisations or individuals post the work or solutions they seek as an open call, adding guidelines and a prize. Solution providers from HeroX’s crowd in 175 countries then self-select their participation and submit their work. The sponsoring organisation selects the top entries and awards the prize. HeroX has dispersed over $40 million in prize payments related to over 350 resolved challenges.
HeroX has successfully driven innovation for world-changing organisations including NASA, GE, Lululemon (athletic apparel retailer), Anheuser-Busch, Lockheed Martin, NFL, Harvard Innovation Lab, NBC and hundreds of others which are great open innovation examples. Here’s where to go if you are considering or already have a challenge that HeroX could help to resolve, or to enrol as a solution provider: www.herox.com/.
Open IDEO
Open IDEO was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. It positions itself as partnering with leading organizations to drive collaboration, innovation, and impact around the world’s toughest social and environmental problems.
An example of the issues they seek to help resolve is the “Beyond the Bag Challenge”: How might we transport goods from retailer to destination in a way that is compatible with diverse retail systems, delivers ease and convenience for customers, and reduces environmental impact? 58 ideas were shortlisted and nine were acclaimed as winning solutions.
Clients include The Rockefeller Foundation, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, McDonalds, Starbucks and Nike.
Wazoku
Wazoku launched in 2011, and is headquartered in London with offices in Bristol, UK and Copenhagen, Denmark. It works with organisations such as Waitrose (supermarket), HSBC (bank), Diageo (drinks) 
and the UK Government, helping them embed innovation as a core, strategic, everyday capability through capturing, collating, and evaluating raw ideas to select the ones to transform into actionable improvements. Their mission is “to change the world one idea at a time.”
Wazoku’s core product suite, Idea Spotlight, is a customisable off-the-shelf solution with modular design that ensures scalability whilst meeting diverse requirements of complex global businesses. It is sold on a SaaS basis, meaning customers license the software instead of making a single upfront purchase. This results in a closer ongoing relationship and a high level of recurring revenues.
Wazoku Case Study: University of Oxford
In July 2020, Wazoku acquired the US platform InnoCentive and its global network of almost half a million expert problem solvers. In November 2020, it announced it was partnering with innovation consultancy Schumpit to extend its international expansion into Spain and Portugal, where it already worked with Parlem Telecom, a leading telco, and a range of manufacturing, retail and pharmaceutical clients. At the same time it also partnered with Latin American innovation consultancy Transforme, which has offices in Spanish-speaking Chile and Ecuador.
Current projects in 2024 include a partnership with Angelini Pharma to improve drug delivery systems for better management of epilepsy. Wazoku has also been working with NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator to support its day-to-day operations.
Brightidea
Brightidea’s mission is to “create a world where the best ideas win.” Since 1999, and through offices in San Francisco and New York City, they have so far helped over 300 global brands with innovation management, idea management, open innovation, crowdsourcing, hackathons, digital transformation and product development. Clients including Accenture, Bayer, GE, GM, Merck Healthcare and MasterCard provide good open innovation examples.
Merck Healthcare is committed to using open innovation to secure input from external contributors
Their proprietary idea management software is called Idea Box. They offer different products to harness the ideas and co-creativity of employees, to develop and nurture an ecosystem of external innovators, and to quickly identify the best idea prospects in an incubator hot-house.
HYPE Innovation
HYPE began in 2001 in Bonn, Germany. Today, it has over 100 employees based in offices in Germany, France, and Boulder, Colorado. It aims to work as a partner with its clients to co-develop innovative and transformational strategies.
They offer a range of dedicated tools to address varied innovation scenarios, and all the innovation activities can be tracked on a unified platform to provide integrated solutions and maximise value creation.
With HYPE Innovations’ support, organizations can engage employees, customers or partners in idea generation and collaborative problem-solving. Clients include global companies such as Airbus, AkzoNobel, ConocoPhillips, Deutsche Post DHL Group, Fujitsu, Mattel, Merck, Nokia, Saudi Aramco and Siemens.
In February 2024, HYPE Innovation announced their merger with Planbox, another trailblazer in the field of open innovation platforms.
HYVE
HYVE launched in 2002 and is based in Munich, Germany. It has additional international offices in Austria, Switzerland, and Gran Canaria, and works with partners around the globe. HYVE specialises in consumer-centric product development and business transformation. They describe themselves as “the speedboat helping corporate tankers to innovate the lean way and encounter the disruptive changes of today.”
They invent, design and develop product innovation technology, services and business models within an end-to-end process starting with customer insight generation at what they call the “fuzzy front end” of innovation, and concluding with production and market entry. All activities are focused on value co-creation with consumer communities who are always at the centre of the process. Interdisciplinary teams combine skills in three convergent dimensions of hardware, software and data analytics that are the building blocks of today’s products and services.
HYVE has worked with 70% of DAX-listed companies (Germany’s stock exchange) as well as with other international and small or medium-sized companies. Notable clients are Audi, Allianz, P&G, LEGO, Siemens and Lufthansa.
In April 2023, HYVE became part of the Qvest Group, which is a worldwide leading system architect, ICT integrator, and software product developer.
Use of open innovation by a HYVE client: LEGO SERIOUSPLAY
Planview
Planview is a software company based in Austin, Texas, specializing in providing enterprise software solutions to help companies improve their project and portfolio management, resource management, and work collaboration processes. Many of the world’s most innovative companies partner with Planview to support and improve their connected work systems. The company’s software is designed to assist organizations in optimizing their operations, aligning their projects with strategic objectives, and maximizing resource utilization through making data-driven decisions. It serves more than 4,500 worldwide enterprise customers.
Planview offers a suite of products that cater to various aspects of project and portfolio management. This includes end-to-end enterprise project portfolio management (PPM) software that helps businesses effectively manage their projects, programs, and portfolios; cloud-based project portfolio management solutions for smaller and mid-sized organizations; a collaborative work management platform that enables teams to plan, execute, and track projects in a visual and user-friendly environment; and a management tool designed to improve workflows and efficiency.
In 2018, Planview acquired Spigit, an open innovation management platform that helps companies capture, evaluate, and implement ideas from employees and customers. Today, Planview’s Innovation Management capability enables its clients to collect and manage ideas, harnessing insights from everyone in the organization. A myriad of ideas can be narrowed down to the ones with the greatest potential through a system of voting, predictions, and pairwise comparisons.
In 2022, Planview closed a $100 million funding round, and acquired Value Stream Management vendor Tasktop (which had grown by a record 41% in 2021). Planview’s 17% growth in annual recurring revenue in 2022 continued through to Q1 2023. In July 2024, the company announced plans to invest $125 million over the next four years to bolster its operations in India.
Its range of solutions are utilized by a diverse range of industries, including IT, manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, and more. Here is a link to their innovation management case studies.
Nosco
Nosco is a Danish innovation platform and consulting company that helps large companies become more innovative through open and collaborative models of innovation.
Nosco is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and started in 2006. It is owned by a team led by CEO Jesper Müller-Krogstrup. The company provides a comprehensive suite of tools and consulting services designed to support and accelerate innovation within organizations. Their offerings include strategy development, innovation management, and the implementation of customized workflows to drive impactful innovation initiatives. They also offer a social platform for innovation where companies can run their innovation challenges, build innovation communities, or run open innovation programmes.
Clients include Heineken, Volvo, Novo Nordisk, Ørsted and VELUX.
Chaordix
Chaordix was founded in 2006 and is based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It is a social community platform designed to help marketing, crowdsourcing and innovation teams to create and launch online communities for employees and consumers. It is a global leader in customer co-creation and crowdsourced innovation software, powering collaborative communities to deliver customer insights, ideas and open innovation.
The Chaordix Community Platform allows top brands to connect with their customers, fans and employees in a space where they get control over the member experience. With a custom social feed, brands are able to drive insights, engagement and co-creation through creative challenges, activities, polls and discussions – leveraging “power of the crowd” creativity to solve unique business challenges.
Their global client base includes LEGO Group, P&G, HTC, Rust-Oleum, Ford, KPMG, American Airlines, Vodafone and Virgin, helping them build engaged communities and co-create new products and marketing success through innovation technology.
This Ford case study is one of several good open innovation examples.
Qmarkets
UK-based Qmarkets has supplied innovation management software solutions to leading companies across the globe since 2008 – including Ford, Hyundai, Deutsche Telekom, Nestle, and UBS.
Qmarkets’ software has a suite of products to help enterprise-grade clients capture ideas and amplify ROI from innovation ventures, continuous improvement practices, scouting initiatives, open innovation with customers and business partners, innovation technology scouting for enterprise M&A opportunities, digital employee engagement, and more.
Their claimed USP among open innovation platforms is a flexible modular approach that allows clients to quickly configure a process that adapts to the requirements of any group within the business, while easily maintaining centralised control and visibility through advanced self-admin functionality. With a feature-rich selection of powerful evaluation tools, a global network of partners, and a suite of products tailored to every corporate challenge or use-case, Qmarkets claim they can help any organization to transform ideas into results, and can provide good open innovation examples.
Qmarkets is headquartered in Rosh Haayin, Israel. The company also has offices in Mountain View, California; Stamford, Connecticut; Puteaux, France; Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Milan, Italy; and London, UK.
There are other very good actors in this sector, including 100% Open, IdeaScale, and Imaginatik. 100%Open provides a useful 30-piece toolkit that covers the whole open innovation journey, from setting a strategy for collaboration to implementing mutually beneficial business models. We’re also starting to see more open innovation technology and crowdsourcing platforms that focus on only certain industries, such as Ennomotive and the Australian platform Unearthed in the engineering sector. Could you let us know of other open innovation platforms you have used or heard good things about, or tell us about some open innovation examples?
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