Innovation Services

Crowdsourcing – innovating with international creatives

Using the HYVE Crowd for Open Innovation

Open innovation stands for gathering input from outside sources. In that sense, crowdsourcing is an excellent tool to open up external knowledge to your organization. HYVE has been a crowdsourcing pioneer developing the first crowdsourcing project over 15 years ago.

Over time, we have built a powerful software tool and a global, diverse community of innovators. These 10,000 creators are ready to generate new ideas, develop technology use cases or validate your concepts in a defined timeframe. Their shared knowledge perfectly complements your innovation process. As we have already built the community, it is effortless for you to crowdsource. You don’t need to worry about developing a platform or recruiting suitable participants.

Our proven process empowers you to get the maximum value from the crowd. We accompany you in framing and setting up the crowdsourcing contest, involving the right stakeholders, managing and incentivizing the community, and making the new ideas actionable for your organization.

Open Innovation

Global Community

Cross-Industry

Unbiased Perspective

Unlimited Creativity

Co-Creation

Open Innovation

The intrinsic motivation of the HYVE Crowd members leads to efficiently and effectively solving challenges together on our crowdsourcing platform by common discussions and diverse input.

 

Are you interested in crowdsourcing?

Ideation

With our co-creation approach the crowd develops ideas to solve your technical or organizational problem or develop new products and services. Based on the ideas, we can derive underlying consumer needs and identify innovation potential.

crowdsourcing ideation

Use Case identification

The diverse members of the HYVE Crowd apply their different perspectives to develop new use cases and applications for your existing technology. This allows you to transfer you existing technology to new markets and develop new partnerships.

 

Finding use cases for existing technologies through crowdsourcing

Validation

Testing ideas quickly has become core to they way we think about innovating. The HYVE Crowd offers a great first look at ideas. They provide qualitative feedback that you will not get internally as they look at your innovations with fresh new eyes.

topic framing icon

Manage Crowdsourcing yourself or get help from our experts

You can manage your crowdsourcing campaign on your own in a do-it-yourself manner. This is perfect when you already have some experience and primarily want to leverage the power of the existing community and platform. If you are not familiar with the concept and functionality, we are happy to support you throughout the process.

1. Set-Up

Topic framing

For a successful campaign, the framing of the topic is essential. It guides the community to submit the right contributions. Topic framing defines the right problem & solution space (e.g. innovation fields, customer-specific topics, etc.) with the appropriate communication strategies. A suitable incentive structure ensures that the community is motivated to engage.

Content Creation

You need the right content and communication strategy to reach our campaign goals. Based on the results of the topic framing, we need to create all relevant platform and communication texts. Further, visual inspirations, motivating video material, and initial ideas guide the community to make your campaign a success.

Coach involvement

Coaches are necessary for improving submissions during the live phase through their technical expertise. While the campaign is live, contributions come in regularly. It is crucial to challenge submissions to improve them. In the coach training, HYVE shows coaches how the platform works, how to co-create with the community, and effectively gain feedback.

2. Campaigning

Communication clipart

Recruiting & Communication

Reaching the right people with the right message is essential for a successful campaign. We develop a strategy with you to address your desired target group. With the plan in place, HYVE communication designers help to design suitable visual material for the communication like posters, flyers, videos, or anything that suits the defined needs. Communication specialists develop the perfect copy to address the audience.

Community Management

During the live phase of a campaign, community experts moderate the activities on the platform. They welcome and support participants with their first steps, feedbacking submissions, answering questions, monitoring campaign development, and handling issues. Often, campaign hosts underestimate the effort of a crowdsourcing campaign and disregard it during the live phase. As community management is crucial for campaign success, HYVE community experts ensure a motivated community and a seamless project.

Community Management

Continuous Improvement

What gets measured gets managed. On a regular basis, HYVE updates the client about the progress of the contests, answers questions, and consults on ways to further improve the output. The crowd experts rely on their experience from years in the field to adapt the approach as needed. In the reporting calls, we discuss the current developments and suitable measures. We invite technical experts, if necessary, to discuss specific contributions.

3. Selection of the best contributions

Workshop illustration

Idea Assessment Center

As a final act of your campaign, it is crucial to discuss the best submissions and lay the ground for future development. We evaluate and structure ideas to prototype more efficiently in the next step. The Idea assessment workshop identifies the best ideas, which our experts translate into concrete concepts. The process starts with a pre-selection of ideas based on both the expert assessment and HYVE’s idea assessment process.

Incentivizing process

Jury Meeting

Based on a shortlist of the best ideas and concepts we have selected, we can select the final winners. In the jury meeting, we moderate a discussion of the ideas with top management, who make the final selection of the winners. As ideas are often only brief submissions and not well-elaborated concepts, presenting the top ideas professionally and actively moderating the jury meeting is necessary. The jury meeting also offers us the chance to get a different perspective on the ideas and get buy-in to further pursue the ideas.

Product development sprints

Implementation Bootcamp

As crowdsourcing is a very inspiring and creative method, it is also often the case that you cannot implement submissions in their original form. Before deciding which concepts to pursue, it makes sense to iterate the winning ideas within an ideation boot camp to enrich the submissions and validate the solution with potential customers. You will go through our adapted double diamond model in a compressed format and make your way from idea to a validated concept.

Why HYVE?

Crowdsourcing is a core competence at HYVE and has been part of our offering for over 15 years. As a pioneer in the field, HYVE has accompanied dozens of small, medium-sized, and large corporations on their path of using the wisdom of the crowd. We have tried many approaches throughout the years, from building custom platforms and communities to developing the HYVE Crowd with its sustaining user base. With our end-to-end approach, we have made crowdsourcing a part of many innovation processes. We are excited to bring our expertise and passion also to your innovation project.

Are you interested in learning more about using crowdsourcing

These companies trust HYVE when it comes to Crowdsourcing

BMW logo
Janssen company logo
abbvie logo
lufthansa logo
Allianz logo
Bundesministerium Finanzen
OeBB logo
voestalpine logo
Procter&Gamble
zeiss logo
Intel logo
Sanofi Genzyme Regeneron
Canon Logo
blum logo
Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie logo BMWi
Mastercard logo
Swarovski logo

Pöttinger

Innovations are indispensable for agricultural engineering companies and hence an essential part for the sustainable success of the company. HYVE helped us effectively generate and structure them.

Klaus Pöttinger, Geschäfts­führender Gesellschafter der Alois Pöttinger Maschinenfabrik GesmbH

Bombardier

I was very positively surprised, firstly by the number of submissions that we got but also by the creativity and quality of the submissions. So the results through HYVE Crowd have been excellent for us.

Josef Doppelbauer, Vice President Project Management & CTO, Bombardier Transportation

BMW

It is great to see a community partnering with us to solve problems of the future mobility. It is always great to see how well the community of HYVE understands our customers’ needs and their mobility use cases.

Dr. Matthias Meyer,  Founder and Head of BMW Startup Garage

 

Volkswagen

Volkswagen corporation was looking for new concepts for a car body with less joint complexity which can be mass produced.
How could such a body look like? Which new joining methods can be used? How can classic joining methods be reduced? These questions were profoundly answered by the community.

Dr. Alev Kirazli Project Manager for Autonomous Transport & Open Innovation | Digitalization | Industry 4.0, Volkswagen AG

Air Cargo

Die Air Cargo Innovation Challenge suchte nach neuen und kreativen Ideen, wie der Kundenservice aufgebaut werden sollte und in den kommenden Jahren funktionieren sollte. Der Wettbewerb konzentrierte sich vor allem auf Kunden-Touchpoints, bei denen Kunden und Kundendienstabteilung in Kontakt kommen; Apps & alle Mittel der Kommunikation mit neuen Technologien sowie Kundenbindungsprogramme. Es gab auch einen Bereich namens “Blank Room”, in dem die Teilnehmer eingeladen wurden, ihre spannendsten und out-of-the-box Ideen einzureichen, die nicht in die anderen drei Kategorien passen.

Erik Feder, Air Cargo Innovation Challenge Projektmanager

Henkel AG 

Ich wusste nicht, was ich von dem Wettbewerb zu erwarten hatte – es war eine völlig neue Erfahrung für mich. Um ehrlich zu sein, war ich überrascht, wie viele Leute in der HYVE Crowd an dem Wettbewerb teilgenommen haben. Es ist eine großartige Erkenntnis, dass ein Wettbewerb ein so mächtiges Werkzeug sein kann.

Michael Becker,  Leiter Global Packaging Engineering, Henkel AG 

Telekom Deutschland GmbH 

Ich bin der festen Überzeugung, dass intelligente Verbraucher die wichtigsten, aber auch die am meisten unterschätzten Innovationstreiber sind. Kundenorientierte Unternehmen sind daher gut beraten, ihren Kunden sehr genau zuzuhören. Die HYVE Crowd hat uns dabei perfekt unterstützt.

Dr. Lothar Müller, Leiter Vertriebsentwicklung, Telekom Deutschland GmbH