Messe München Enters into Partnership with InnoCentive

The new partnership will support Mess Munchen's Open Innovation service which connects industry members with one another to help solve industry challenges.

At bauma 2016, Messe München announced a new partnership on April 11: In future, the American innovation pioneer InnoCentive will support Messe München's Open Innovation service. Companies will have access to even broader expert knowledge, especially when tackling highly complex innovation problems in the construction machinery sector. 

On the Innovation Day during the bauma Forum, Stefan Rummel, Managing Director of Messe München GmbH, and Steven Drew, Vice President Business Development EMEA at InnoCentive Inc., officially announced the partnership between the two companies. As a result, companies wanting to use the Open Innovation service can now take advantage of not only the Messe München network, including its world-leading trade fairs, but also the InnoCentive global community with over 400,000 experts to solve innovation problems. 

Partners welcome collaboration

Rummel is pleased about the arrangement: “InnoCentive is a pioneer when it comes to open innovation and has a well-versed community of experts that have already solved highly complex problems for companies such as NASA. We are delighted to have them as a partner for our Open Innovation service. Exhibitors at capital goods trade fairs in particular will benefit from the technical knowledge of our experts.” Craig Jones, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer at InnoCentive, adds, “Technology and connected individuals and organizations are the great enablers of open innovation. Bringing together the extensive networks of InnoCentive and Messe München, and the wealth of expertise and industry familiarity these networks hold, creates a hugely exciting opportunity for driving innovation in the areas of industrial goods and beyond. Partnering with Messe München on this initiative carries a special significance for us and we're looking forward to the new innovation challenges and solutions that will come out of it.”

Using expert knowledge with protected anonymity 

Through this partnership, Messe München is catering to the needs of its customers in the construction machinery sector with specific requirements when it comes to innovation management. In many cases, the innovation work of these companies involves highly complex challenges, the solutions to which are not permitted to be made public. This is where Messe München's Open Innovation service comes in, backed up by InnoCentive. The InnoCentive community comprises over 400,000 people who specialize in a wide range of areas, are experts in their respective fields and have experience in solving complex innovation problems. 

Messe München's Open Innovation service includes translating a company's innovation problems into “challenges” which can then be addressed and solved by the expert community. The experts' work when coming up with a solution is totally anonymous and results are returned straight to the provider of a challenge, in other words, the original company or exhibitor. The company can then select the best solution and award prize money. Community members are spread across the world, are highly trained and specialize in an extremely wide range of areas—they even include research institutions and universities. As a result, they are the ideal complement to the existing Messe München network which already combines heterogeneous sector knowledge.

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