Leveraging the Power of the Crowd

Open Innovation is a process by which an individual (in this case a business representative) can post a project to an online community (in this case students). Members of the community get the opportunity to review the project details, and determine their level of interest. Those who are interested, can opt-in and compete against the other participants to submit the best final result. Once the deadline arrives, the project owner reviews all submissions and selects the winner.

What Makes BrainMatch Unique from Other Open Innovation Solutions?
Aside from our focus on building a community of students to engage in the projects, BrainMatch has a few other key differentiators we offer that make us different from other open innovation solutions.

Businesses can limit competitions to suit their own needs. Most crowdsourcing platforms are designed to have as broad a reach as possible. BrainMatch recognizes that there are sometimes reasons to limit who can participate in a project. Consequently, our solution is designed with some abilities that help businesses target specific students for different reasons. For example:

• If a business wants to set up a ‘scholarship’ type project that is only available to their employees and/or customers relatives, they have that option.
• If a business wants to keep a project local to their own community, they can limit a project to a specific geographic region.
• If a business has partnered with a teacher or school, the posted projects can be limited to students of a particular institution or even classroom.
• If a business is sponsoring a Scout or other similar type of community group, the project can be managed on BrainMatch but limited only to invitees who are members of the organization in question.
• If a business is interested in finding an intern or part-time employee, the project award could be placement in that role instead of funds into a student’s 529 account.

Businesses sponsor and support students all the time, in any number of ways. BrainMatch’s goal is to provide a platform to meet the needs of organizations that are already directly engaged with students, as well as to make it easier for businesses with no prior experience in this area to get started.