• StartUps

Jayesh Badani and Madhu Mani both spent over a decade in the IT sector and met each other at Wipro where they spent about four years together. Badani was part of the IT firm’s innovation process and it was during this phase that the idea to make innovation for collaboration germinated. In November 2009, along with Mani who was ready to take the entrepreneurial leap of faith, Badani launched ideaken, a platform to connect innovation seekers with solvers. “Projects can be across any domain, innovation as we define it is something novel that does not exist in public or with any company,” says Badani, Founder and CEO, ideaken. As a platform, ideaken enables enterprise innovation seekers to collaborate with innovation solvers, who could be customers, global pool of talent, research vendors or academia, and find solutions to their challenges, powered by technology. In two years, it has proved the viability of its concept, and found feasible solutions for 40 percent of the total 40-45 complex innovation needs it has received so far.

Getting the whole system up and running took a few months and dedicated efforts at spreading the word. Badani, for one, had his blog on innovation which he used to its fullest potential and managed to generate some traction by way of interested parties. As a stepping stone, the founders put three projects, and reward money from their side, Rs.45,000 per project. Since then the startup has consciously decided to take on challenges that are highly technical in nature.

Its business model requires enterprises to register themselves for a fee, which allows them to publish challenges as subscribers. “Sometimes challenges just stay there and requires extra effort on our side to find solvers with specific skills in a domain, in such cases we charge extra up to Rs.45,000 per month,” he says.

Once a seeker finds a solution, ideaken takes a percentage of reward as commission ranging from seven-10 percent of the reward amount. Currently, ideaken has served nine MNCs with registered innovators across 170 countries and attracts approximately 100 new registered innovators per week on its platform.

While today it has a continuous flow of innovators, the platform’s deep web crawling technology searches for the right innovators. “It is a mixture of automated and manual,” says Madhu Mani, Director, ideaken. It could be a database repository, research papers, and its software is built to find related words and maps them with challenges to find solvers.

In July 2010, after experimenting with ideaken’s services for a few months, yet2.com, a U.S.-based IP transfer firm, formed an alliance with the startup.

For ideaken, this was another means to generate a flow of challenges. “We had built a rapport on our blog and they didn’t know our capability back then,” explains Badani. In the first month, the startup failed to find any solvers for their challenges. Determined to prove their potential, the founders asked for another attempt, as a make or break deal. “They agreed to one more month, and we gave exceptional results this time,” he adds. The tech startup was able to provide 20 solutions in two months for three of the five projects it received.

Despite its achievements, ideaken is still ahead of the curve in many ways, given that the concept of innovative collaboration is quite new in India. The founders faced this challenge when targeting Indian firms. “They are not receptive to the concept of open innovation,” says Mani.
To avoid this challenge, ideaken has initiated something called co-creation, wherein enterprises can co-create with a known audience, within their firm, with employees, partners, or customers. This, however, is still at an experimental stage.

While it tests feasibility of such initiatives, the ideaken founders are also toying with various expansion plans ranging from partnerships in different geographies and scaling up technical support in Bengaluru with an in-house team to co-ordinate operational work and help grow the business. This is apart from negotiating funding requirements with a set of potential investors.

©Entrepreneur September 2011

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ideaken, Jayesh Badani, Madhu Mani, startup