InnoCentive and Booz Allen Hamilton Form Strategic Alliance

WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--InnoCentive, Inc., the pioneer in open innovation and crowdsourcing, and Booz Allen Hamilton, a world leader in management and technology consulting services, today announced a strategic alliance to help commercial and government organizations harness the power of prize-based Challenges, open innovation, and crowdsourcing to solve critical mission issues faster and more effectively. A Challenge is a proven approach to solving important problems by leveraging large communities of people (crowdsourcing) who can bring new expertise and diverse perspectives to the table. Monetary prizes, recognition, and opportunities to continue funded work are just a few of the incentives that attract problem solvers to Challenges.

“We believe that the partnership with InnoCentive will provide our joint clients with an integrated resource that accelerates innovation and problem solving capabilities to help them deliver against their missions faster and more cost-effectively.”

The InnoCentive and Booz Allen Hamilton alliance will provide clients with integrated, full-service open innovation and Challenge offerings, including the Booz Allen Hamilton-InnoCentive Open Innovation Diagnostic Program. This Program combines InnoCentive’s unique Challenge Driven Innovation methodology and problem solving platform with Booz Allen Hamilton’s deep technical expertise, implementation, and management capabilities in both government and commercial organizations.

Under today’s new economic realities, with budget and personnel levels decreasing and stakeholder demands for high-performance increasing, government organizations face significant pressures to innovate. The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 provides government organizations a new option to utilize prize-based Challenges as a pay-for-performance resource to help foster innovation and solve problems faster and more cost-effectively.

“Both InnoCentive and Booz Allen Hamilton have a proven track record in delivering solutions to real problems for our government clients,” said Jon Fredrickson, vice president of government at InnoCentive.

Allan Steinhardt, a Booz Allen Hamilton vice president, elaborates: “We find that agencies are serious about leveraging new tools and methods to find innovative solutions to problems that matter most to their missions, while also advocating for public-private partnerships, and promoting transparency, openness, and collaboration across government.”

Additionally, within many commercial organizations, the current innovation capabilities, pipelines, and portfolios are insufficient to drive growth and sustain category leadership. Executives struggle with product launch delays and getting new products to market, budget cuts, tight schedules, diminishing productivity, and competitive dynamics. Open innovation aims to alleviate these pressures – as an augmentation and accelerant to existing internal R&D – by enabling companies to harness diverse and global communities of knowledge and talent for the purpose of increasing problem solving capacity, improving business performance, and fundamentally changing the economics of innovation.

“Our two companies understand better than anyone that delivering value to clients is dependent on extracting the best ideas and solutions from the global community,” continued Steinhardt. “We believe that the partnership with InnoCentive will provide our joint clients with an integrated resource that accelerates innovation and problem solving capabilities to help them deliver against their missions faster and more cost-effectively.”

Available now, the integrated Booz Allen Hamilton-InnoCentive alliance provides commercial and government organizations with:

The Open Innovation Diagnostic Program that includes vision and objectives definition, benchmarking, readiness, gap analysis, and strategic recommendations
Leadership best practices and organization-wide training
Challenge identification, prioritization, formulation, and execution
Multi-channel Challenge program design and roadmap development
Community (i.e. problem solver) development and engagement strategies
Measurement and continuous improvement
Supporting enabling technologies, platforms, and tools

“Mounting pressures on all of our clients to drive efficiencies and implement better approaches to problem solving and innovation creates a unique opportunity and window,” said Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of InnoCentive. “Whether it is innovating faster to bring products to market more quickly, or providing new tools to public sector agencies to help them better deliver on their missions, the timing could not be better. This partnership and our joint go-to-market solutions represent a force multiplier for both commercial enterprises and government organizations alike.”

About Booz Allen Hamilton

Booz Allen Hamilton (www.boozallen.com) is a leading provider of management and technology consulting services to the U.S. government in defense, intelligence, and civil markets, and to major corporations, institutions, and not-for-profit organizations. Booz Allen is headquartered in McLean, Virginia, employs more than 25,000 people, and had revenue of $5.59 billion for the 12 months ended March 31, 2011 (NYSE: BAH).

About InnoCentive, Inc.

InnoCentive is the open innovation and crowdsourcing pioneer that enables organizations to solve their key problems by connecting them to diverse sources of innovation including employees, customers, partners, and the world’s largest problem solving marketplace. InnoCentive’s proven Challenge Driven Innovation methodology, community of millions of problem Solvers, and cloud-based technology platform combine to fundamentally transform the economics of innovation and R&D through rapid solution delivery and the development of sustainable open innovation programs. Leading commercial, government, and nonprofit organizations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Eli Lilly, Life Technologies, NASA, nature.com, Popular Science, Procter & Gamble, Roche, Rockefeller Foundation, and The Economist partner with InnoCentive to solve problems and innovate faster and more cost effectively than ever before. For more information, visit www.innocentive.com.

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