REDWOOD CITY, CA -- Innovation drives the global economy with worldwide spending on innovation and R&D topping $500B. To find winning ideas, companies have started to experiment with "open innovation", the concept of considering ideas from many sources including customers, employees, partners and the public.
Xpree "Open Innovation Markets" is a key tool for Open Innovation inspired by "Wisdom of Crowds", a book by James Surowiecki. Not only does the tool allow the crowd to suggest ideas, it also allows this crowd to rank and analyze these ideas.
"The problem when you open up to a mass brainstorm is the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, you know there are great ideas there, but selecting them while keeping the process fair and open is a challenge" states Xpree's CEO, Mat Fogarty.
How it Works
Open Innovation Markets is a 3 step process: 1) ideas are submitted, 2) users vote on the ideas, 3) users bet on the key metrics related to the top ideas using a prediction market - examples of key metrics include when will the product launch? how much it will cost to develop? etc. If the product is developed then these bets are closed out with the actual results.
Key Advantages
The key advantages of using crowd based innovation over a more traditional "Innovation Committee" approach, are that as the crowd is filtering and analyzing the ideas - innovators are less likely to feel discouraged when their idea is not selected, as they are closely involved in the selection process. By using the crowd to forecast key metrics such as launch date, the company can avoid the innovator's optimistic bias and can increase the chance of the innovation being adopted by a business unit. Finally, rather than saying "No" to most of the ideas submitted, top management's job becomes saying "Yes" to great innovations.
A free trial of Open Innovation Markets is available from today from www.xpree.com
About Xpree
Xpree is a privately held corporation, based in Redwood City, California. Xpree focuses on delivering crowd based forecasting and innovation systems.
For media enquies, please contact media@xpree.com
###
