Perspectives on Innovation

I recently received this piece from Gabriel Eichler, one of our Client Services team members, and I wanted to share it with you all. He goes into detail on the important role that InnoCentive plays as a broker between the Seeker and you the Solver:

As most of our clients and members of our community already know, InnoCentive plays an important role in brokering Open Innovation interactions between Seeker organizations and you, our network of talented Solvers. Brokering such transactions is difficult since InnoCentive serves as a two-way firewall between the Seeker organization and Solver by keeping all parties anonymous throughout the process while simultaneously ensuring the integrity of the interaction. It occurred to me, however, that since most individuals interact with InnoCentive as either a Seeker or a Solver (and rarely both), they are unfamiliar with the actions undertaken by InnoCentive’s Client Services Team on behalf of both parties. To improve the understanding of both our Seekers and Solvers, I’ve dedicated this blog entry to a brief discussion on how InnoCentive’s Client Services Team supports these innovation interactions.

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What a wonderful day to announce the InnoCentive Top Solver Awards for 2007! I think it’s fitting that we launched the blog the same day that we honored the top Solvers, because after all this blog is devoted to our Solver community.

Announcing these awards is particularly bittersweet for me as in my role as Vice President of Client Services I have the opportunity to interact with most of our Solvers and these 11 individuals (yes, it was too difficult to round it down to 10) really stood out on top. These Solvers go to the heart of our mission statement they represent the human creativity and intelligence that makes our model work. Watching our Solvers in action and seeing these bright minds at work is truly gratifying.

Out of over 100 winning solvers last year, 11 Solvers top the leader board by either grossing at least $50,000 or by solving multiple Challenges in 2007. Of course we did have a couple of over-achievers in the group who met both criteria. Nikolay Barashkov, Ed Melcarek, Wenhui Zhang, Ming Zhou, Anatoly Chernyshev, Hegui Hu He, Sekhar Konjeti, James Mitchell, Dr. Ammanamanchi Radhakrishna, Eugeny Savin and Giorgia Sgargetta.

Each Top Solver will receive a crystal award and be recognized on the new “Top Solver” section of our website. From engineers and scientists to creative entrepreneurs, our Top Solvers are as diverse in their vocation as they are geographically – representing 7 countries. For more background on the winners, click here.

Lisa