IdeaConnection

IdeaConnection is an open innovation intermediary and innovation resource portal. It specializes in innovative high-tech solutions to complex scientific, engineering, and business problems, and publishes innovation-related resources (interviews, success-stories, open problems).
History
IdeaConnection was started in 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia by Scott and Wendy Wurtele who had previously launched WorldBid.com (est. 1997) and
the legal news site LawyersAndSettlements.com (est. 2000). The IdeaConnection portal is owned by Online Data Services Ltd.
Services
Innovation intermediation
The main service that IdeaConnection offers is open innovation intermediation, a form of crowdsourcing and collective intelligence. Although crowdsourcing started with outsourcing simple repetitive "human intelligence" tasks (cf. Amazon Mechanical Turk), it has recently been adopted with knowledge-intensive and research-based projects, even by companies with their own sizable R&D departments (GE, IBM, Netflix, P&G and others, see Crowdsourcing projects for details).
The approach that IdeaConnection takes can be summarized as follows. Companies who need help with solving certain theoretical problems or challenges, submit the problem to IdeaConnection who then invites experts from its database to participate. A group of facilitators narrows the people who reply down to half a dozen, these people will offer their solution to the challenge problem as a team. To guarantee objectivity, the challenges are double blind -- the teams do not know who the solution seeker client is and no information is posted on the website. but not all problems that companies submit find a satisfactory solution, in 2009 IdeaConnection conducted about 45 challenges and successfully solved half of them. These social innovation solutions are not compensated; most of them go live.
Innovation popularization
Besides intermediating between solution seekers and expert solution providers, IdeaConnection publishes open innovation and invention success stories, interviews with innovation authors, lists of pre-screened available innovative technologies and other open innovation resources.
Related platforms
Other platforms that offer innovation intermediation services and help firms reach experts in the crowd include Ideawicket, Innocentive, Innovation Exchange, NineSigma and Yet2.com, see Open innovation intermediaries
and List of crowdsourcing projects for more.

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