Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing pilot action: Vouchers for developed solutions of the research project (O.T4.7)

The pilot action was the fith of six pilot actions carried out simultaneously in all seven partner regions to test and introduce the new services on the SYNERGY platform for Crowd Innovation.
 
The crowdsourcing- and crowdfunding-related pilot action “Vouchers for developed Solutions of the Research Project” was comprising of two parts:
  • Collecting crowdsourcing campaigns on the SYNERGY platform
  • Matchmaking with possible solution providers from the crowd
 
In the midst of the global pandemic of Covid-19, the SYNERGY consortium decided to offer this pilot action to the fight against the spread of the Corona virus and it gave the possibility to research teams working on specific epidemic measures to collaborate with other researchers in Central European regions. With this respect, the SYNERGY Platform hosted challenges for innovation focused on the Covid-19 pandemic and also related to the Key Project Areas (KPAs) Industry 4.0, Additive Manufacturing and Micro- and Nanotechnologies. The project partners were asked to identify possible challenge givers with an innovative project contributing to the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. Once these challenge givers had uploaded their challenges and search for competences/skills on the platform, solution providers could offer their competences and solution proposals. At the end, collaboration between challenge givers and takers was formalized in 3 research plans detailing how the envisaged solution solved the challenge and met the requirements established by the challenge givers.
 
In addition to promoting the recently published SYNERGY Platform, the pilot action helped to develop technical solutions required in a pandemic situation in a fast and easy way with the help of the knowledge from the crowd. The best & most successful projects were awarded a voucher to the value of €2000 that could be used for different services like consultancy, training, business plans, market analysis, research ordering and a lot more (article winner Vouchers for developed Solutions Research Project pilot action).
 
With this pilot we wanted to show the possibility of creating collaboration among different stakeholders to solve a common problems and join efforts towards a common goal also cooperating with unknown people and organizations. The pilot action showed that crowd innovation approaches are very essential and helpful for fast solutions in emergency situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
By including various interest groups from all partner regions, the pilot action had a transnational character. The reproducibility of the pilot action is given, the pilot action can be carried out well in this format in other partner regions or subject areas to increase the awareness on crowd innovation initiatives. 


In the following we provide you with links to all relevant outputs and tools: 

SYNERGY Platform Crowdsourcing Service https://synergyplatform.pwr.edu.pl/challenges.

SYNERGY Vouchers for Developed Solutions of the Research Projects Pilot Action; Image Source: SYNERGY Project

SYNERGY Vouchers for Developed Solutions of the Research Projects Pilot Action; Image Source: SYNERGY Project