SYNERGIC CROWD INNOVATION PLATFORM (O.T3.1)
The SYNERGY Platform as an open innovation environment for industry and academia.
- The main aim of the SYNERGY Crowd Innovation Platform is to provide an open innovation environment for industry and academia with various newly designed services enhancing crowd innovation initiatives in Central Europe. The platform enables industrial companies to define their needs and problems and research institutions to provide jointly developed solutions.
- The SYNERGY Platform essentially offers four types of crowd innovation services for different user groups such as representatives of industry, science, business development or the general public:
- Crowdfunding for small research projects,
- Crowdsourcing challenges for innovation, and
- Infrastructure Sharing among Central European regions
All those who are interested in opening up their innovation processes to external ideas, competences and resources can create a new challenge on the platform or contribute to a proposed challenge with their own solution. In this way, the platform enables users to improve the effectiveness of idea and product development, find solutions beyond the boundaries of their own institution, discover new collaboration opportunities, receive feedback on their own ideas and even conduct product trials. The SYNERGY platform has the advantage over existing tools in that it integrates various crowd and open innovation collaboration mechanisms into a single tool.
The functionalities and characteristics for the development of the SYNERGY platform have been defined on the basis of the needs and expectations for successful transregional cooperation defined by the intensive involvement of actors from science, industry, business development, the general public and other target groups that are the potential future users of the platform. At the same time, research on best practices and success stories for Crowd Innovation approaches was conducted by all project partners at regional and international level in order to identify proven concepts and niches in the market of Crowd and Open Innovation platforms. The functionalities of the platform were tested extensively through various pilot actions and with the involvement of different user target groups in order to align the platform in the best possible way according to user needs and thus to start first activities on the platform.
- The main impacts and benefits of the SYNERGY Platform are:
- Enabling the exchange of experiences, skills/competences and resources between Central European innovation actors.
- Building and maintaining sustainable linkages between innovation actors from common interests and disciplines.
- Facilitating the development of transregional cooperation and collaboration in common areas of interest.
- Overcoming common challenges such as administrative barriers for innovation and low New Member States participation in research and development.
- Creating an innovation-friendly environment to enhance the overall innovation capacity in Central European regions.
The SYNERGY platform is also free of charge and open to all interested users. If you are interested, you can create an account via the following link and create a campaign or challenge to one of the three services. For first assistance the user manual is available on the platform. We are looking forward to your ideas and contributions!
- In the following we provide you with links to all relevant outputs and tools:
- SYNERGY Platform https://synergyplatform.pwr.edu.pl/.
SYNERGY Crowd Innovation Platform; Image Source: SYNERGY Project
