Indianapolis September 19, 2001 Honoring breakfasts are nice, awards are nice, and company-wide e-mails trumpeting your accomplishments are nice. But none of those ways of recognizing efforts put food on the table. That takes money. (As a friend of mine says, money isn't everything, but it is why you work.) Even the softest cotton t-shirt pales in comparison to cold hard cash. And cash is what drives one inventive collaborative effort.
Quovix, which provides collaborative tools and strategies, announced today their relationship with InnoCentive LLC, an e-business venture of Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Company. InnoCentive is using Quovix's software tool, the Quovix CommunityBuilder, to orchestrate and manage communication among pharmaceutical researchers.
"InnoCentive, a key Quovix customer, represents the heart and soul of what the Internet is all about: an open-source approach to scientific collaboration and innovation. Using Quovix's tool, InnoCentive has created a new business model that represents a return to the Internet's roots," said Darren Carroll, CEO of InnoCentive.
The Quovix tool allows scientists to respond with solutions to scientific challenges or problems that are posted on the InnoCentive Web site. Whoever provides the most innovative solution to the challenge is rewarded with a cash incentive. This approach enables InnoCentive to access researchers from around the globe to solve complicated problems. You were the catalyst for cracking that vexing chemical code? Here's some money. Knock yourself out.
According to the company, the Quovix CommunityBuilder enables collaboration across thousands of knowledge workers around the globe. "We created Quovix to revolutionize how work gets done in this world thinking not only about the technical challenges, but also about the underlying business processes and the community itself," says Marty Morrow, CEO of Quovix. "Our CommunityBuilder tool includes the ability to manage project information and then goes well beyond that to allow our customers to build and manage their communities, establish business process flows that follow their process not a process that has been pre-built into a software product," continues Morrow.
"We set an outrageous goal for ourselves and our partners: go from concept to a full-fledged company with a high quality, usable solution in 103 days," says Darren Carroll, InnoCentive CEO. In just over three months, InnoCentive was operational, accessing more than 600 scientists from Beijing to Scotland in its first two weeks.
