Since its founding in 2013 by serial entrepreneur Christian Cotichini and XPRIZE Founder and Futurist Peter Diamandis, the HeroX social network has facilitated the crowdsourcing of numerous innovations that addressed some of the world’s greatest challenges. Now HeroX has partnered with London based 100%Open, the award-winning agency for open innovation, leveraging the two companies capabilities and strengths to offer innovators the best possible innovation experience.
Through HeroX, innovators have a single place where they can “build, grow, and curate” a crowd of experts behind a common goal. The platform brings together over two million registered innovators who want to make positive contributions toward changing the world. With this recently announced collaboration, 100%Open has direct access to those innovators, while the HeroX’s sponsor community gains access to 100%Open’s highly regarded and effective innovation toolkit and technology search capability.
“The partnership between the two companies consists in an exchange of access points where both 100%Open and HeroX can add new tools to their respective clients’ innovation toolbox,” said Christian Cotichini, HeroX co-founder and CSO. “We are thrilled to offer 100%Open the opportunity to simplify a previously cumbersome step in the process. Plugging into the HeroX network of innovators is similar to switching on the light in a dark room. We couldn’t be happier to provide the power source.”
The HeroX platform accepts submissions of challenges in sixteen areas such as technology, government, engineering, healthcare and more. Posts made to the platform provide a detailed description of the challenges seeking solutions and a monetary prize that will be awarded to those who propose an accepted solution.
The joining of these two organizations creates great synergy due to their similar histories of advocating and using “open innovation” to solve large scale challenges. Henry Chesbrough who is the educational director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at Berkeley Haas coined the term “open innovation”. He offered an alternative approach to the way companies develop their ideas that up until then relied heavily on their internal R&D.
Before Chebrough’s advocating of an open innovation process, companies relied on internal innovation that was centered on the protection of their intellectual property. Researchers and innovators shared little to no information with those outside of their facilities. This closed innovation process kept out external ideas—which Chebrough felt contributed to the slowing of innovation for new products and services.
Now HeroX and 100%Open are creating a collaboration strategy that will enhance how they partner across disciplines. They are motivated by the impact of rapid technological change—particularly relating to the pace of market disruption surrounding the post-pandemic recovery. They believe that sustainability is now a top priority requiring new approaches due to the global challenges now emerging.
Their open innovation strategy will be “a more cost efficient and cost-effective way forward” for HeroX’s global crowd of innovators.
“We help organisations create new products and services by connecting them to the best people, ideas, and technologies in the world,” said David Simoes-Brown, CEO of 100%Open. “In a nutshell, we help the suits collaborate with the sneakers. This is open innovation, and over the course of 15 years, we have found that it’s more efficient, creative, and faster than our clients innovating on their own.”
100%Open’s 30-piece toolkit offers a rapid onboarding process for a company to pursue an open innovation journey. It readily addresses the “starting point, size, geographical location, or structure” of a challenge. A prime example of this is how 100%Open jump-started an open economy in Columbia. They held over 30 challenges in one year and the methodology they introduced still remains in use today.
100%Open, over the past fifteen years, has helped its clients co-create new products and services with staff, consumers and new innovation partners. Their joining of diverse organizations catalyzes new people and fresh ideas into a process that has had proven results. They have achieved significant successes for their clients, achieving a minimum of a 10x return on investment for global clients such as Mars, Barclays, Ford and LEGO.
The combining of 100%Open’s experience and HeroX’s global platform demonstrates that open innovation partnerships can be established in any marketplace or industry. Innovators can more efficiently co-create or crowdsource relevant ideas and then prototype the best ones based on the strengths that each partner brings to the challenge. Additionally, the new partnering relationship enables innovators to more efficiently curate a crowd behind their challenge or clarify questions that were raised.
To gain a sense of the magnitude of the HeroX crowd, its network of partners and innovator communities includes Inocrowd, CollabWith, TopCoder, and Versatile PhD, among others. Inocrowd has over 600,000 solvers with a range of competencies and Versatile PhD has over 100,000 PhDs. This global aggregation of brain power and talent from universities, students, recognized geniuses, innovative start-ups, and spin-offs creates the strongest approach to solving persistent global challenges.
“In a market where most platforms are used for internal communications, it’s great to partner with HeroX because they know how to solve global challenges on a global stage,” said Simoes-Brown.
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