Innocentive brand returns as global crowdsourcing marks 25 years

Wazoku has reinstated the Innocentive brand name for its open innovation crowdsourcing community as Innocentive marks its 25th anniversary.

The rebranding reintroduces Innocentive's established marketplace to Wazoku's growing global network, which now comprises over 700,000 members including solvers such as PhDs, entrepreneurs, engineers, data scientists, and climate specialists. Since its founding in 2000, Innocentive has delivered more than 200,000 innovations, solved over 2,500 challenges with an 80% success rate, and awarded more than $60 million to participants.

The Innocentive marketplace has worked with clients including NASA, Novartis, Nike, the Gates Foundation, Porsche, Microsoft, and various government departments to source solutions for complex challenges. The return to the Innocentive name is described as a reflection of the community's hybrid model of synthetic intelligence and human expertise.

Simon Hill, Chief Executive Officer at Wazoku, said, "Innovation has never been more critical, and we stand at the dawn of humanity's greatest creative renaissance. The fusion of human ingenuity with synthetic intelligence is creating unprecedented opportunities to solve existential challenges and unlock trillions in new economic value."

Hill continued, "Our Innovation Intelligence ecosystem brings together Wazoku's market-leading software solutions and Innocentive's global talent marketplace to transform how organisations innovate. By reinstating the Innocentive name, we're strengthening our approach to help enterprises navigate complexity and turn ideas into tangible, world-changing outcomes."

Since the acquisition of Innocentive by Wazoku, significant changes have been made to grow and diversify the solver community. In September 2022, Wazoku integrated the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's 120,000-member Climate CoLab Community, widely recognised as the world's largest crowdsourcing platform focused on climate change solutions.

The Innocentive community now represents a globally diverse and highly educated network. According to company data, 58% of its solvers hold advanced degrees - Master's, PhDs, and Post-Doctorates - across a range of expertise including life sciences, engineering, data science, IT, and climate technology.

Demographically, the marketplace's solvers are dispersed across key regions, with 39% based in North America, 29% in Asia, and 23% in Europe. Notable growth has emerged recently in China and South America, the latter following the acquisition of crowdsourcing platform Channge in 2021. The company also reports an increase in partnerships across Africa.

Efforts to improve the diversity of the solver network have included increasing participation from women and individuals identifying as neurodivergent since 2020.

Innocentive's problem-solving community is actively contributing solutions to issues relating to climate change, healthcare, advanced materials, and sustainability. The platform's model involves presenting organisations' challenges to its global crowd, who then submit actionable ideas or solutions for evaluation and potential financial award.

Hill said, "We're entering an era where the deliberate orchestration of diverse minds, both human and synthetic, will determine which organisations thrive and which falter. The combination of Wazoku's innovation management platform and Innocentive's global solver community creates a powerful engine for addressing today's most pressing challenges. We're not just helping organisations solve problems, we're empowering them to make smarter decisions that create sustainable prosperity, drive GDP growth, and address planetary challenges simultaneously."

He added, "By bringing together the best innovation tools and the world's most diverse problem-solving network, we're defining a new approach to innovation that will shape the next century of human progress."

Originally launched in 2000, Innocentive has established itself as one of the earliest and most enduring open innovation networks and has been used by organisations worldwide to drive product, process, and service innovation.