South Korea’s Leading Research Institute and InnoCentive Call for Breakthrough Ideas to Beat Covid-19

Challenges are posted on an open innovation platform for mask designs and technologies, and new ideas for personal protective equipment to prevent the transmission of coronavirus.

Waltham, MA - 1 May 2020 – The Seoul Institute of Technology, the leading research institute in technology policy and city administration ran by Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is working with open innovation firm InnoCentive to prevent the transmission of Covid-19.

The Seoul Institute of Technology (SIT) launched the challenge on 21 April and in addition to looking at mask filter technology, will also look to generate ideas around other Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). The project will run for 30 days and contributions will be sought from InnoCentive’s global network of more than 500,000 expert problem ‘solvers’, comprised of engineers, technologists, start-ups, material experts, life scientists and business experts. A total award pool of up to $60,000 is available for successful submissions.

“Covid-19 has uncovered some of the toughest challenges the world has had to face and this has highlighted the importance of open innovation and co-creation in generating the best solutions and ideas to address those challenges,” said Jon A. Fredrickson, Vice President, Chief Innovation Officer, InnoCentive. “Masks and PPE to prevent transmission of Covid-19 will be vital in the on-going work to come through this crisis and it’s an honour for our platform and community to be used by the Seoul Institute of Technology for this purpose.”

InnoCentive recently announced a partnership with UK idea management scale-up Wazoku. Wazoku’s Idea Spotlight innovation platform has been integrated with InnoCentive’s solver network and Challenge Driven Innovation™ methodology which has created the world’s most comprehensive and powerful innovation platform and community.

The two companies recently launched a Covid-19 specific challenge center to address Covid-19 challenges for companies, governments, and NGOs. These were some of the first challenges to be run across the new integrated, best in class innovation platform and community, and one of the initial projects has already resulted in a faster path to create ventilators.

“This new SIT challenge complements our other Covid-19 challenges with clients and governments around the world,” continued Jon A. Fredrickson. “Our solvers have a proven track record at finding the unknown unknowns and delivering solutions to these types of challenges. With our partner Wazoku, we now have a more powerful and sophisticated platform to support our community, further enhancing our clients capabilities for innovative solutions and importantly co-creation.”

The SIT came to InnoCentive via Technovation Partners, the leading innovation consultancy and long-term partner to InnoCentive in Korea. Commenting on the challenge, Dr. Youngje Jeong, Principal of Innovative Technology Center of the Seoul Institute of Technology said:

“The Seoul Institute of Technology is looking for new technologies to solve MB filter shortage problems and is interested in anyone that can help with this. Using the InnoCentive community we hope to discover new technologies that can solve issues and help alleviate this current situation.”

This is a Theoretical Challenge that requires only a written proposal to be submitted. The Challenge award will be contingent upon theoretical evaluation of the proposal by the Seoul Institute of Technology.

Further details on the Seoul Institute of Technology’s challenge can be found here.

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For further information about InnoCentive, please visit https://www.innocentive.com/
For further information about Wazoku, please visit https://www.wazoku.com
For further information about the Seoul Institute of Technology, please visit https://sit.re.kr/

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