Company Profile: InnoCentive

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"The Rockefeller Foundation helps spark innovations that can improve lives in communities around the world. Our partnership with InnoCentive is a crucial component of this work, enabling researchers and entrepreneurs to identify the models and approaches that private companies use in achieving breakthroughs and then adapt them to solving seemingly intractable social challenges."

— Judith Rodin, President
The Rockefeller Foundation

InnoCentive: Where the World Innovates

Description: InnoCentive is the open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer that enables organizations to solve their key problems by connecting them to diverse sources of innovation including employees, customers, partners and the world's largest problem solving marketplace.

Offering: InnoCentive's proven Challenge Driven Innovation methodology, community of millions of problem Solvers, and cloud-based technology platform combine to fundamentally transform the economics of innovation and R&D through rapid solution delivery and the development of sustainable open innovation programs. Using InnoCentive's Web 2.0 platform, a Seeker organization posts a Challenge—a problem for which it seeks a breakthrough solution to the InnoCentive Marketplace and commits to pay a successful Solver a cash award. InnoCentive Seekers benefit from a pay for performance low-risk environment where they only pay for solutions they accept.

Accomplishments: InnoCentive has helped hundreds of companies, public sector agencies, and nonprofits find solutions to their pressing problems. Below is a sampling of important Challenges that have been solved.

$1 Million Prize for ALS Research: Prize4Life posted a challenge to accelerate the development of a biomarker - an inexpensive and easy-to-use tool to accurately measure the progression of ALS in patients. It was won by Dr. Seward Rutkove, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Oil Spill Recovery Challenge: The Oil Spill Recovery Institute posted three Challenges, all dealing with recovery issues. An individual in the concrete industry solved the first of these Challenges and was awarded $20,000 for his creative solution.
SunNight Solar Solar Light: Posted a Challenge to develop a dual-purpose solar light that would function as a lamp and a flashlight to be used in African villages. An electrical engineer from New Zealand solved the Challenge in two months and was awarded $20,000.

Leading commercial, government and nonprofit organizations, such as Eli Lilly, Life Technologies, NASA, nature.com, Popular Science, Procter & Gamble, Roche, Rockefeller Foundation and The Economist, partner with InnoCentive to solve problems and innovate faster and more cost-effectively than ever before.

Additional statistics illustrate the positive impact InnoCentive has made on the world since 2001 (as of Q2 2011):

Total Registered Solvers: Approximately 250,000 from nearly 200 countries
Total Solver Reach: More than 12 million through our strategic partners
Total Challenges Posted to InnoCentive.com: > 1,300
Project Rooms Opened to Date: 339,726
Total Solution Submissions: 24,256
Total Awards Given: 866
Total Award Dollars Posted: > $28 million
Range of awards: $5,000 to $1 million based on the complexity of the problem
Average Success Rate: 50%

Founders: The idea for InnoCentive came to Alpheus Bingham and Aaron Schacht in 1998 while they worked together at Eli Lilly and Company. The company was launched in 2001 by Jill Panetta, Jeff Hensley, Darren Carroll and Alpheus Bingham, with majority seed funding Lilly. In 2005 InnoCentive was spun-out of Lilly by an affiliate of Spencer Trask, enabling the company to expand its offerings and serve clients in a variety of other industries.

Financing: Spencer Trask Ventures has led a total of $23 million in financings for InnoCentive since 2006.

Recent News: InnoCentive and Popular Science Partner to Stimulate Worldwide Interest in Science and Technology Innovation (Aug. 15, 2011)