Organizations, Governments, and Corporations all need to innovate to improve and maintain leadership positions but this often entails outside-the-box thinking and highly aversive self-disruption. So what is an incumbent leader or well-established organization to do? One approach, exemplified by a leading insurance company purchase of an app for 800M in 2012 was to acquire the tech and teams that have achieved traction in the marketplace. Another is to try to innovate from within or with close partners, like one Fortune 100 company in 2013 spent 50 Million dollars for their new best in class baby product. While these traditional “closed” methods are pretty effective, they are also very expensive. Open Innovation, where you let crowds help, enables innovation faster, better, and at lower cost than ever before possible.
What is Open Innovation?
Open innovation has been around for centuries with contests that resulted in the development of navigational methods in the 18th century and rockets in the 20th, but not until we all became hyper-connected did it work as well as it does today. Corporations, Organizations, Government Agencies, and simply individuals can direct open innovation programs quickly and easily through online crowdsourcing. Crowds can provide ideas, prototypes, effort, and even funding in ways that can help any organization move forward faster.
Want to Innovate for Less, Get Open
Open Innovation programs have been found to be over 1,000 times more capital efficient than traditional acquisition-based or in-house development. Yes, there are issues with being too open, but this is accounted for in the design of your Open Innovation outreach, something we can help you with as well.
How to Get Started with an Open Innovation Program
Getting startd with Open Innovation is easy when you work with MedStartr. Strategic investors in the MedSTartr.vc Venture funds can get programs for free now but we also offer packages of services that include Awareness, Engagement, Activation, Events, Consulting, Support, and a Technology platform that handles all the details. To tap into the power of the Crowd that Cares, Simply:
- Define the problem clearly
- Set the parameters for success, and
- Offer a reward to those who satisfy your mission AND the crowd loves.
The rest is up to our crowd of team members, mentors, supporters, and the crowd that cares about your care innovation. Creative individuals and teams will rise to the challenge and put forth amazing new ideas. When people see an idea they like, they get behind it, doing all your market testing for you. This isn’t by accident though, it is all engineered and based upon an important fact we learned early in our development, specifically:
It takes an ecosystem to drive innovation in healthcare
In addition to creating a great product, innovators must build awareness, drive adoption, engage partners, raise significant funding, and of course, keep building – all at once. Whether you are an established business or a small startup, the challenge is roughly the same. This is why we needed to develop not just a Crowdfunding platform, but a total healthcare innovation environment complete with mentors, partners, community support, patient activists, foundations, engaged physicians, and government leaders. We have found that engaging all the stakeholders in innovation works best.
When you choose to work with MedStartr, you aren’t just getting access to the world’s first Crowd Challenge platform, you get:
Awareness Services – to ensure the maximal reach for your campaigns
Experts – to provide fair judging, crowdfunding optimization, mentors, and access to partners
Operational Support – to make sure everything happens just as planned
Engagement Services – to not only start the conversations but to make sure they are driven to the point of delivery
These key services are layered upon and supported by our Award Winning, adaptive Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding Technology. If you have a vision of how you would like our platform to work better, we will build it fast and well. Check out our Crowdfunding Challenge Demo here or visit one of our larger Crowd Challenges we ran for 16 sponsors to drive innovation in New Orleans. You can also see another of our best that we ran for the American Medical Association here.
These are just two examples of what we can ramp up quickly for our clients.
Our Open Innovation Services model has grown organically from what works for driving independent innovation. Partners kept coming to us and our clients, buying them or partnering with them once they achieved crowdfunding success. Our Mentor Network and MedStartr Model also grew naturally and now some of the largest companies in the world helped us design our challenge platform and are using it to find and test partners, investments, and companies worthy of funding.
We would love to help your organization too. Please take a moment to email us about your challenges or fill out this online form and let’s see what we can do together!