SeaFreight Labs and InnoCentive Announce Strategic Partnership
New service utilizes crowd-solving to help carriers and forwarders solve toughest problems
Newark, New Jersey, September 5, 2019 – SeaFreight Labs, a specialist in open, challenge-based innovation for the sea freight industry, and InnoCentive, a global leader in crowd-sourced innovation, today announced a strategic partnership to deliver advanced crowd-solving services to the sea freight industry.
​
The new service combines the deep domain expertise of SeaFreight Labs with InnoCentive’s proven ability to deliver diverse solutions from thousands of different individuals. The combined offering insightfully defines a challenge, efficiently evaluates submissions and helps seekers fully leverage the results for maximum benefit.
​
InnoCentive accesses a diverse solver universe of over 400,000 skilled individuals from countless industries and over 195 countries and territories around the world. As a result of its 18-year history, InnoCentive has a proven process for crowdsourcing solutions starting with clearly defining a client’s problem and then designing a challenge to solicit useful solutions and ideas for a cash reward for success. The Company’s 75% success rate, in the challenges they have run, is far better than traditional innovation/R&D project-success rates.
​
Harry Sangree, the Founder of SeaFreight Labs, explained: “The sea freight industry is experiencing continuing pressure to improve services and reliability while lowering costs. It needs to concurrently respond to new challenges regarding its environmental impact and its long-awaited digital transformation. These challenges are massive and multi-faceted; they require a new innovation paradigm that can act at a pace never seen before.”
“I started SeaFreight Labs because I felt the existing industry landscape could not move as aggressively on these issues as is required. We literally need to leverage the expertise of the whole world to tackle today’s sea freight challenges. I am excited that this partnership introduces a revolutionary new capability that is customized for the unique innovation needs of ocean carriers and freight forwarders.”
“I love the quote from Steve Jobs", Sangree continued. "‘Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it. If you're gonna make connections which are innovative... you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.’”
​
“The point Steve is making,” Sangree clarified, “is that innovative thinking requires doing things smarter than others. It is vital to leverage every possible resource to get the broadest set of perspectives regarding whatever problem one is trying to solve. The InnoCentive partnership allows SeaFreight Labs to offer this capability to the sea freight industry in a cost-effective and time-efficient turnkey process with a high likelihood of success.”
​
Jon Fredrickson, the Chief Innovation Officer at InnoCentive, said, “We are eager to partner with SeaFreight Labs and Harry Sangree to bring our proven, cost-effective approach for innovation to the sea freight industry. InnoCentive will deliver breakthrough ideas and solutions by bringing our diverse Solvers and experience in innovation to the leaders of this vital global industry and we are looking to SeaFreight Labs to introduce us into situations where we can add value.”
​
SeaFreight Labs will be the exclusive marketing representative of InnoCentive to ocean carriers and global freight forwarders.
​
About InnoCentive:
InnoCentive is the most experienced open innovation and crowdsourcing company that supports Fortune 1000 companies, government entities, and non-profit organizations to find solutions to their business, operational, scientific, and technical issues. InnoCentive has a long history of success for their clients from solving challenges to big industry or global problems. Since its inception in 2001, InnoCentive has leveraged its Challenge Driven InnovationTM methodology and transient intelligence-built platform to crowdsource solutions on over 2,400 external Challenges from a global knowledge network of over 400,000 freelance problem solvers that spans 195 countries and territories. InnoCentive’s full-service solution includes consulting, challenge design, training, and program management services to help organizations cultivate solutions both externally and from within. Learn more at www.innocentive.com.
​
About SeaFreight Labs:
SeaFreight Labs is an open-innovation consultancy exclusively focused on the global SeaFreight industry. We believe that the biggest competitive and technical threats in SeaFreight should be tackled through the curated use of global innovation Challenges. A SeaFreight Labs Challenge is a cost-effective antidote to the universal constraints that: 1) no single company has enough smart people; and, 2) no individual has enough breadth of experience.
​
Learn more at www.seafreightlabs.com. See examples of successful ocean-related challenges at www.seafreightlabs.com/examples.