InnoCentive, Inc., the global open innovation marketplace, and scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, has announced a partnership to facilitate greater scientific collaboration and open innovation.
Under the deal, InnoCentive and NPG will work together to stimulate the involvement of scientists worldwide in solving global scientific challenges, via an online marketplace for problems and their solutions. The concept of 'open innovation' addresses the research challenges that organisations face, by using external expertise to solve problems and drive development of new products and technologies. Global challenges such as the development of better protection against malaria, finding ways to shorten the clinical trials process and the design of environmentally friendly, sustainable product packaging, to name a few, require broad and diverse expertise.
InnoCentive's open innovation web site provides a platform for organisations, companies and government agencies (known as 'Seekers') to post innovation 'Challenges' for the public (known as 'Solvers') to solve for financial reward. NPG and InnoCentive intend to jointly produce an online platform for open innovation challenges in the coming months, to facilitate the participation of NPG's large expert audience.
This agreement comes at a pivotal time when businesses, especially those in life sciences, are endeavoring to maintain research and development activities with reduced budgets and resources. The partnership of NPG and InnoCentive is expected to accelerate the uptake of open innovation as a complementary business model that has particular appeal during a global economic downturn.
