At HeroX, the world’s leading platform for crowdsourced solutions, we believe we are our best when we work together, leveraging our collective intelligence to drive innovation forward exponentially.
By bringing together a diverse set of minds from across the globe, HeroX is able to focus the power of our unique crowd to solve critical innovation problems for dynamic organizations of every size and stage.
And today, through an exciting partnership with Versatile PhD, we will add 110,000 more PhD’s, postdoctoral scholars and graduate students to the HeroX crowd, in service of connecting the brightest minds with the world’s biggest problems.
“To answer the most vexing innovation and research questions, crowds are becoming the partner of choice.” - Kevin J. Boudreau and Karim R. Lakhani via HBR
Throughout history open innovation and crowdsourcing have been the driving force behind innovation. Perhaps the best known example is the Longitude Act of 1714, whereby Great Britain turned to the crowd to devise a simple and effective way of determining a ship’s longitude, to better facilitate safe and reliable transoceanic travel.
By tapping into the diverse, collective intelligence of the crowd, Great Britain was able to access solutions beyond the most talented scientific minds of the era. John Harrison, an English carpenter and watchmaker, eventually claimed a significant portion of the prize by inventing the marine chronometer - collecting £23,065 or more than $4.2 million in 2020 dollars!
Today, the 110,000+ PhD’s, postdoctoral scholars and graduate students now part of HeroX’s Crowd represent a similarly untapped talent pool that will undoubtedly help solve today’s most intractable problems facing corporations, governments and communities.
We know, according to research by Carnegie Mellon University professor Anita Williams Woolley and her colleagues, that a defining factor in the power of collective intelligence is the degree of diversity which exists in a collaborative group. HeroX’s crowd draws upon the expertise, and spontaneous collaboration between minds from nearly every professional discipline, distributed across 180+ countries. HeroX now has perhaps the most diverse and skilled community of solvers on the planet, ready to solve any problem facing your organization.
“The HeroX crowd just got a little smarter,” said Christian Cotichini, CEO, HeroX. “Our vision is to create a crowd-enabled world, and this partnership gets us one step closer by extending our reach and bringing the VPhD community into the fold. Companies crowdsourcing on HeroX will get the benefit of the brightest minds, while participating PhD students, postdocs, and alumnus from the top universities will get unparalleled experience.”
In continuing to grow our diverse community of expert solvers, HeroX is uniquely positioned to radically magnify the talent of internal teams to help organizations solve important problems in extremely efficient ways. In one recent challenge we ran with NASA, HeroX’s crowd was able to produce a viable solution within 6 months at 1/130th of the cost that had previously been spent unsuccessfully.
Many people new to crowdsourcing often wonder if crowdsourcing is for them, or whether this type of open innovation will produce actionable solutions. According to Deloitte, “crowdsourcing is part of an ecosystem of rapidly maturing technologies and methods that look set to play a fundamental role in the future of commerce and society.”
Our mandate at HeroX is to empower organizations of any size and stage with an extremely simple platform that methodically taps into talent pools beyond their employee base, to unlock fresh thinking and accelerate the innovation process. By adding 110,000 new PhD’s, postdoctoral scholars and graduate students to our diverse crowd, we know now more than ever before that our crowd, coupled with our approach, can revolutionize your organization.
Organizations like NASA, GE, Rio Tinto, 3M, Dell, Ford, Johnson & Johnson and Unilever have all successfully leveraged crowdsourcing to solve complex problems. We know that crowdsourcing works, and at HeroX we’re here to help apply the fundamentals of crowdsourcing and open innovation to any challenges facing your organization.
We cannot wait to see the results that participating PhD’s, postdoctoral scholars and graduate students generate when they apply their experience and expertise from academia to real-world problems. The world’s problems just became a little bit more solvable, and in turn the future just got a little bit brighter.
To learn more about how HeroX and our community of solvers can help apply the power of crowdsourcing to help drive innovation for your organization click here.
