Project

Opening up of innovation processes through the active involvement of external stakeholders in the development of innovative solutions has been increasingly used for years. Nonetheless, the bridge between business and science as well as the integration of the collective knowledge of society in research and development processes has not been used enough to date. Idea competitions (challenges) as part of crowdsourcing offer a participatory opportunity to bring idea seekers together with idea providers from science, business and society (so-called solvers) on an innovation platform.

Project description

The BMBF project Crowd Innovation aims to boost the transfer of knowledge and technology between science, industry and society through ideas competitions. The project aims to achieve this through the demand-oriented further development and consolidation of the user-oriented digital crowdsourcing platform (hereinafter referred to as the Crowd Innovation Platform). The Crowd Innovation Platform connects people with innovative ideas and promotes applied research in the field of crowdsourcing for more participation in innovation processes.

The central research question focuses on the impact of idea competitions.

Services provided by Fraunhofer ISI

A minimum of eight idea competitions will be held during the project term and accompanied by the Fraunhofer ISI researchers in order to achieve the project goals of Crowd Innovation. These are innovative project initiatives from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, other research institutions, start-ups and companies that want to use the swarm intelligence for their project(s). The impact these ideas competitions have on the idea seekers and their projects is documented using research methods such as interviews. The Fraunhofer ISI's Crowd Innovation Platform will be used to carry out the ideas competitions and will be further developed over the course of the project to include additional features to improve user-friendliness.

Clients

German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

Projektträger Jülich

Project duration

1.10.2023 – 30.6.2026