Better and faster innovations with PhantoMinds’ instant automated recruiting tool for open innovators

Project Information

PhantoMinds

Grant agreement ID: 888809

DOI

10.3030/888809

Project closed

EC signature date 4 November 2019

Start date 1 December 2019

End date 31 May 2020

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

PHANTOMINDS GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PhantoMinds (Better and faster innovations with PhantoMinds’ instant automated recruiting tool for open innovators)

Reporting period: 2019-12-01 to 2020-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the era of globalization and digitalization, innovation is broadly recognized as a success factor for economic growth and prosperity for the economy and countries as the whole. The same is true on the company level. In the innovation race, the biggest challenge for companies is to build and identify the right and executable ideas and innovations, especially ideas and new products their customers want and buy. Nowadays companies waste money and competitors’ advantages by having a product flop ratio of 70-90%. Therefore, PhantoMinds offers companies in Europe – SMEs and large companies – an open, customer centred and digital innovation system via a crowdsourcing approach. The customer orientation is necessary and the best alternative to existing innovation systems, as the consumer has dramatically changed his/her own understanding of its consumption role. Consumers are no longer interested in only consuming products. They want to and already are sharing their opinions about products and discuss alternatives, improvements and changes via social networks. They see and position themselves as “influencers”, “trend-setters” and “opinion leaders”. A minority goes beyond and acts as so-called “prosumers”. They produce their own products by themselves or adapt existing solutions to their own needs. Using and streamlining this societal impetus, PhantoMinds enables SMEs to use these consumers out there managing a crowdsourcing community platform to develop ideas and innovations by using the perspectives, expertise and knowledge from the creative community and/or in combination with external experts and the companies’ clients.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

"PhantoMinds offers companies an open, digital and iterative innovation process via a crowdsourcing approach. By doing so, PhantoMinds enables SMEs to use the crowdsourcing community platform to develop ideas and innovations by using the perspectives, expertise and knowledge from the creative community and/or in combination with external experts and the company’s clients. We have already designed and implemented a new module as a ""big data"" solution named ""innovator/lead user online screening for companies"" on twitter, facebook/instagram and LinkedIn. The advantage of this “lead users recruiting machine” is to identify specific experts from respective fields of activity for innovation projects for companies. The identification and recruiting of the relevant ‘crowd’, i.e. relevant experts or specific customer groups, is already proven by several use cases of us in the b2c- and b2b context. The assessment is executed by a customer-centric development process to check especially the practical feasibility for the target customers and the economic viability. The general technological feasibility is already proven by the PhantoMinds team.

Quick decision making, rapid prototyping and swift response to feedback and new trends are more important than ever. To enable this PhantoMinds offers the first fully automated expert recruiting approach. This enables the users/experts to participate in any innovation project for any company from wherever they want to. The entry barriers to participate in the innovation process are incomparably low. The matchmaking offers the innovation project only to those experts, which are eligible due to interests, expertise, willingness and motivation to participate. Both are offered to companies as a fully automated and holistic digital innovation process. Another USP due to our competitors is the fact that we do not aim at developing a mass of ideas via the crowd, but beyond consolidating these ideas to executable innovations using our innovation community software, which are elaborated in such an extent, for instance a clickable mock-up, that enables a company to directly implement it or assign a service provider to finalize it."

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The Uniqueness of our approach lies in the following:
• instant identification and recruiting of the relevant people, i.e. customers, lead users, experts, influencers, opinion leaders, etc. via/in social media networks,
• own developed classification (score related to ‘lead userness/innovativeness’ / expertise /relevance / influence) of the potential users for the companies using our screening and recruiting crawler and algorithm,
• the identified users are addressed by specific social media advertising (sponsored posts, ads, messages or in-mails) related to the intrinsic motivation of the users and are offered attractive incentives (e.g. exchange with the company, workshop participation, expense allowance, rewards and price money),
• instant recruiting the users directly into the idea development or testing scenario for our client, i.e. in our innovation community, online surveys, etc., and thus, directly into the agile innovation process of our clients.

Our solution helps companies proactively approach digital transformation to secure existing markets and conquer new ones with new digital solutions. However, the innovations are not only developed here, but are even evaluated with regard to their market relevance on the basis of defined criteria, i.e. the innovations include market research, which the company can then save.
PhantoMinds plans to become the standard European-wide open innovation platform to create and discuss the future product, process and marketing innovations which build the future of Europe. The standard is based on collaborative, interactive and digital innovation development integrating every needed stakeholder of the innovation project and process involved.

Automated online recruiting with algorithm