The InnoCentive Insider: The Lifecycle of a Challenge – Behind the Scenes
Hello. My name is Elly Madrigal, and I am the Client Operations Manager at InnoCentive. What does that mean? Every day, I receive new orders for Challenges, review them, assign them to one of our Team members, establish metrics and statistics on our various delivery and success rates, and review these results with our Management and Clients (otherwise known as Seekers).
Since Solvers on our site have limited ability to view the “Big Picture” of the Challenge Lifecycle, I thought I’d paint that picture for you from my point of view. The Challenge is not magically created and emailed to us from these big pocketed Companies (although I wish they were!) They do require a significant amount of development time between InnoCentive Team members and the Seeker Challenge Owners (usually Scientists or Technical Managers). In addition, there is a significant amount of time spent by the InnoCentive Team and the Challenge Owners reviewing your Submissions. Solvers do not see this happening in the background, so I thought I’d tell you what we do when we’re not answering your questions or sending updates on your Submission.
We’ve arranged this process into 3 phases each with specific milestones and deliverables that mark the beginning and end of each phase. Let me apologize in advance for the Project Management lingo, but I can’t help it. So let’s dive in…..
