Waltham, Mass. – January 11, 2012 – InnoCentive, Inc., the pioneer in open innovation and crowdsourcing, today announced the release of the InnoCentive Challenge Platform (ICCP), the first enterprise innovation management system to enable organizations to rapidly engage diverse internal and external innovation communities to help them solve their most pressing problems. The ICCP is a one-stop shop for open innovation that allows commercial, government, and nonprofit organizations to easily engage the right individuals, communities, and networks to rapidly generate creative new ideas, solve important problems, and innovate faster, more cost effectively, and with less risk than ever before possible.

This cloud-based platform is the first and only innovation system-of-record for managing all needs, ideas, problems, Challenges, problem Solver communities, and solutions within organizations of all shapes and sizes. It is the only enterprise-class business application that enables organizations to harness the power of crowds and give everyone a voice – employees, customers, partners, suppliers, and the world’s largest problem solving network that reaches into the millions. By incorporating powerful dashboards and analytics, the ICCP provides a complete and integrated view of an organization’s innovation portfolio and strategy.

“As the global pioneer and leader in open innovation technology and strategic services, we continually push ourselves to build and deliver innovative solutions for our customers,” said Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of InnoCentive. “The InnoCentive Challenge Platform ushers in a new era of enterprise innovation management tools that are designed to improve problem solving capability, accelerate innovation outcomes, and fundamentally transform our customers’ economics of innovation.”

Companies engaged in innovation involving research and development (R&D), product development, and marketing face a variety of challenges, including pricing pressures, keeping customers engaged, increasing staff productivity, managing competitive pressures, and generating higher returns on their innovation investments. As a consequence, successful 21st century innovation organizations require better, faster, and more cost effective ways of solving problems and innovating to drive business growth and spread risk. The ICCP offers organizations better return-on-investment (ROI) on their innovation spending by providing:

• A Single Enterprise-wide Open Innovation System-of-Record: The ICCP is a scalable and secure cloud-based platform that provides an integrated view of all suggestions, needs, ideas, problems, Challenges, and solutions for improved collaboration, search, reporting and measurement, intellectual property management, and auditing. This optimizes the entire Challenge lifecycle – from idea and suggestion capture and collaboration through Challenge formulation, posting, evaluation, and awards – and enables both InnoCentive-facilitated as well as customer-led management of the end-to-end Challenge process.

• Fit-to-Purpose Ideas and Solutions to Problems: The ICCP enables numerous Challenge types to support a wide range of unique organizational requirements, from general idea gathering and prioritization for marketers seeking to gain insight from customers, to complex technical or scientific problems which, if left unaddressed, risk to derail an important development effort. Analytical and computational Challenges, Novel Molecule Challenges, electronic requests for proposal, and high-visibility Grand Challenges provide additional versatility across the organization.

• On-Demand Access to World Class Innovation Capacity: The ICCP provides unprecedented access to innovation talent both inside organizations and to millions of innovators around the world. Organizations have complete control over Challenge distribution to internal, external, and invite-only audiences, including the InnoCentive Global Solver Community, which now reaches millions of diverse and skilled problem Solvers. The platform also provides organizations with full control over who suggests ideas and views and attempts to solve their Challenges through its comprehensive multi-channel management and escalation capabilities.

“We clearly see the value of problem solving with diverse audiences,” said Andreas Kaerner, research advisor, analytical technologies design and development, Eli Lilly and Company. “Our hope is that this evolution of a single platform for managing ideas, Challenges, communities, and solutions, both internally and externally, will further enhance our efforts to speed the delivery of new medicines to patients.”

Additional benefits of the ICCP include:

• Enables organizations to pay for solutions, not work or failure, to fundamentally transform their economics of innovation
• Augments and accelerates existing innovation management processes such as PLM, Stage-Gate, and Six Sigma to preserve existing capital and skillset investments
• Opens up access to diverse and skilled talent without fixed labor costs, enabling companies to pay only for success in the form of actionable solutions
• Improves collaboration with internal and external people as well as existing knowledge resource systems by harnessing the power and diversity of crowds
• Enables complete control of Challenge distribution channels and target problem Solver audiences to optimally align ideas or problems to the audience(s) most likely to solve them
• Supports enterprise gamification initiatives through world-class contest design and audience engagement mechanisms to drive desired organizational behaviors
• Delivers deep innovation reporting, analytic, and measurement capabilities, along with auditing for continuous tracking and improvement

The ICCP is available today. For more information, visit www.innocentive.com.

About InnoCentive
InnoCentive is the open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer that enables organizations to solve their key problems by connecting them to diverse sources of innovation including employees, customers, partners, and the world’s largest problem solving marketplace. InnoCentive’s proven Challenge Driven Innovation methodology, community of millions of problem Solvers, and cloud-based technology platform combine to fundamentally transform the economics of innovation and R&D through rapid solution delivery and the development of sustainable open innovation programs. Leading commercial, government, and nonprofit organizations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Eli Lilly and Company, Life Technologies, NASA, nature.com, Popular Science, Procter & Gamble, Roche, Rockefeller Foundation, and The Economist partner with InnoCentive to solve problems and innovate faster and more cost effectively than ever before. For more information, visit www.innocentive.com.