InnoCentive review
A challenge-focused platform for sourcing, evaluating, and rewarding external solutions.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
InnoCentive is Wazoku’s online open-innovation marketplace and challenge platform. It is designed for organizations that want to publish scientific, technical, business, or research challenges and collect solutions, ideas, proposals, or partnership opportunities from individuals, companies, universities, and other experts. Support for both individual and team submissions makes it suitable for programs that accept contributions from varied participant groups.
The platform covers the core workflow from challenge registration and submission through collaboration, evaluation, scoring, voting, and commenting. Configurable idea and challenge workflows can support different program structures, while duplicate-idea detection and merging help organize overlapping submissions. Challenge awards and intellectual-property agreements add useful mechanisms for programs that need to recognize selected contributors and define how submitted work is handled.
InnoCentive is presented as a web-based product with Microsoft Office integration, so its fit is strongest for teams running open-innovation programs through a browser and working within that ecosystem. The published pricing model is contact sales rather than a self-serve plan structure. Organizations seeking a focused way to source external solutions, manage submissions, evaluate entries, and award outcomes should consider it. Teams that need broad platform coverage beyond the web, a larger documented integration set, or transparent plan-by-plan pricing may prefer an alternative.
InnoCentive pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Supports scientific, technical, business, and research challenges
- Includes evaluation, scoring, voting, and duplicate-idea merging
- Handles awards and intellectual-property agreements
- Where it doesn't
- Pricing requires contacting sales
- Coverage is limited to the web
- Microsoft Office is the listed integration
InnoCentive fact sheet, pricing and score →
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