The Solver’s Edge Kaptivate LLC

Hello solvers,

Welcome to The Solvers Edge Podcast, the podcast that takes you on a journey of why, how, and when does open innovation matter.

I’m your host, Iliriana Kacaniku and today I have the pleasure of introducing you to Aadhythya Sujith, an avid solver of open innovation challenges.  My co-host Mentor Dida had the pleasure of interviewing this mechanical engineer who he has won over 50 open innovation challenges to date.  He is a triple winner of a single challenge with three simultaneous tracks. With the award he won from one of the challenges, Aadhithya started his own listing portal to make open innovation opportunities accessible to all. His platform, Givemechallenge.com, brings numerous ideation and design challenges from multiple platforms in a single place.

Being a passionate advocate of open innovation challenges, Aadhi shared two sets of recommendations that stood out for me:

To the solvers, he recommends:


Use open innovation challenges to build up your innovator brand and profile -  participating in open innovation challenges can enrich your professional profile tremendously. If you’re a student, and think that your resume is still a blank canvas, start painting it with colors from open innovation challenges. Along the way, you will grow your community of equally curious problem solvers with whom you may continue collaborating long after the challenge has completed.

To the seekers, Aadhi has two recommendations:


Use open innovation to learn what problems will the likely overlooked talent help you solve -  These challenges will engage exceptionally smart people who would not have made it to the formal recruiting process because they may not have formal education at all, they may have dropped out, or they may even  be refugees with no credential proofs to show.  I’ve been a refugee myself, and trust me, the last thing you think of bringing with you when running for life is your college or any diploma.
Use open innovation to get a glimpse of overlooked consumer trends and pain points - as you open up the innovation process you will unlock many more related problems, challenges, consumer trends, or consumer pain points.

What about you? What stood out for you?  Feel free to share your key takeaways with us at thesolversedge@kaptivategroup.com. We would love to hear from you.   In the interim, follow us on Spotify, or Apple Podcast, or Google Podcast and subscribe to our newsletter so you do not miss out on our next episodes.

Hello solvers,

Welcome to The Solvers Edge Podcast, the podcast that takes you on a journey of why, how, and when does open innovation matter.

I’m your host, Iliriana Kacaniku and today I am talking to Matan Ben Gigi, the Head of Innovation for SOSA in the United States. SOSA is an open innovation consulting organization, based in Tel Aviv, Israel.  In the episode, Matan shares SOSA's insights about open innovation, and how organizations, corporate and government, can leverage openness best to engage with innovative cutting-edge technology startups. And do so efficiently.

My key learnings:


Metrics matter - even as an open innovation-enabling organization, you need to adopt your own key metric of success.  SOSA’s “high conversion rate” stood out for me.
Internal adoption matters - As an open innovation seeker, you need to figure out internal barriers to adoption of open innovation, build an internal consensus, and then make open innovation an accessible tool for any business unit, and
Visibility matters - As an open innovation solver, especially if you’re a startup, you need to be scoutable and accessible for those who may be looking for your solution.

What stood out for you? What learnings did you take from this conversation? Feel free to share them with us at thesolversedge@kaptivategroup.com. We would love to hear from you.   In the interim, follow us on Spotify, or Apple Podcast, or Google Podcast and subscribe to our newsletter so you do not miss out on our next episodes.

Hello solvers,

Welcome to The Solvers Edge Podcast, the podcast that takes you on a journey of why, how, and when does open innovation matter.

I’m your host, Iliriana Kacaniku and today I have the pleasure of introducing you to Matthew Gaiser, a software developer and an exceptional solver of open innovation challenges.  He discovered open innovation when pursuing internship opportunities. The quest for internship led him to MindSumo,  an open innovation platform that in Matthew’s words enables potential employers to evaluate potential candidates' professional skills via challenge-based testing. Since then, he has solved 426 challenges and won over 250 of them. Listing each one of them would take more than 50 pages of a resume. He has been an obsessive problem solver since his childhood. For him, open innovation challenges seem to be a lifeline of problem solving regardless of whether he has a job or pursuing one.   He shared profound insights about open innovation that pertain to both solvers and seekers.

Listening with a solver’s hat on, I found it valuable that:


Open innovation challenges help demonstrate validated basic understanding of a subject matter
Experience with open innovation challenges matters in the career pursuits

And interestingly, when switching hats to the innovation seeker’s one, being courageous and intentional with the design of the open innovation challenges really stood out. So,


Start with a very small scale of open innovation as it provides that first hand experience needed for further adoption of open innovation.
Be intentional about the problem you’re trying to solve and what you are trying to accomplish, and
Address barriers-to-entry for solvers by being innovative how to reward solvers for the time they took to solve  - to encourage most talented people to engage with the challenge and take valuable time out of their other pursuits, especially if they are pursuing new employment opportunities, have some prizes at the end, so even if people don’t win, they still feel that they got something for their time.

What about you? Did anything else stand out or resonate with you more strongly? If yes, we’d love to learn. So feel free to share them with us at thesolversedge@kaptivategroup.com. We would love to hear from you.   In the interim, follow us on Spotify, or Apple Podcast, or Google Podcast and subscribe to our newsletter so you do not miss out on our next episodes.

Hello solvers,

I’m your host Iliriana Kacaniku and in this episode I’m talking to Filippo Ronzani and John  Ong. Filippo heads open innovation operations and John is an engineer with De Nora,  the Italian multinational company that specializes in water treatment solutions. De Nora is the world’s leading provider of equipment, systems, and processes for water disinfection and filtration.

Though many of us may be learning for the first time, De Nora is a champion of open innovation, having opened up its innovation process in varying levels and modalities since the 1960s.

I had the pleasure of talking to Filippo and John and learning about what it means to innovate in a hard to change and asset-intensive industry  - an industry in which change is costly for both the company and stakeholders in this ecosystem.   I learned a lot, but three things stood out on how open innovation enables change:


Adopt an open innovation strategy - Open innovation requires a strategy, because without it, one is not going to go far. This indicates that in open innovation, culture does not eat strategy for breakfast. Rather, they reinforce each other.  Strategy gives direction on how to both innovate and open innovate, while culture, with its self-catalyzing power creates an enabling environment for open innovation adoption  and strategy execution.
Open innovation enables low-cost low-risk pursuit of innovations that maintain market relevance for the seekers in increasingly faster changing industries, and
In order to maximize the benefits of open innovation, the seekers need to tread outside the boundaries of home-industry or even the well-known processes.

What about you? What did you learn about open innovation in hard-to-change industries? Do you have an example to share? If so, we’d love to hear from you.  So email us at  thesolversedge@kaptivategroup.com.

If you like this episode, follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and Google Podcast. And if you subscribe to our newsletter at www.kaptivategroup.com/thesolversedge, we’ll make sure you do not miss out on our next episodes.

Hello solvers,

Welcome to The Solvers Edge Podcast, the podcast that takes you on a journey of why, how, and when does open innovation matter.

I’m your host, Iliriana Kacaniku and today I have the pleasure of introducing you to Sumit Goski, a solver of 120 and winner of over 20 open innovation challenges. My co-host Mentor Dida had the pleasure of interviewing Sumit. 

Sumit is definitely one of those innovators anywhere, whom I mentioned in the introduction episode. He grew up in a remote village of India, and learned about open innovation challenges after he enrolled in college.  He won the first time he participated in an open innovation challenge.

With this impressive portfolio of challenges, I wanted to learn about his process of solving a challenge and what makes a challenge experience stand out. And few others.

What I learned from him is simple and powerful.

If you’re a solver, remember that:


In open innovation, there is no box - in order to succeed in a challenge, you have to challenge yourself by thinking outside of the box. All the time.
As you develop your challenge solution, leverage your immediate circle of friends and peers to be your first validators and feedback providers.
You need to do your own research into the market in which the challenge resides

If you’re an innovation seeker,


What award you design determines which solvers your open innovation challenge will attract. While monetary awards matter, a clear value proposition for the winning solution’s journey after the challenge matters more to “serious innovators anywhere.”
The way you even the playing field for participants matters – especially if you are launching a challenge on a topic that has no solutions yet identified, and
In open innovation there's no limit to the direction in which the solution can go.

What about yours? What learnings did you take from this conversation? Feel free to share them with us at thesolversedge@kaptivategroup.com. We would love to hear from you.   In the interim, follow us on Spotify, or Apple Podcast, or Google Podcast and subscribe to our newsletter so you do not miss out on our next episodes.

Hello solvers,

Welcome to The Solvers Edge Podcast, the podcast that takes you on a journey of why, how, and when does open innovation matter.

I’m your host, Iliriana Kacaniku and today I am excited to talk to Keaton Swett, the co-founder of MindSumo, an open innovation management platform.  Keaton is both an innovator and an enabler.  He challenged himself with solving a big problem – showcasing student talent beyond resumes so employers recognize and hire them for demonstrated skills and value.  He solved this two-sided problem by co-founding MindSumo, the crowdsourcing innovation management platform for Millennials and Gen X problem solvers.  Since then,  the platform community has grown to over 800,000 solvers from top universities around the world and has hosted over 3,000 challenges for over 100 of Fortune 500 companies.

During the conversation, Keaton reminds us that:


Open innovation is not a one-time Band-Aid solution to your problems. Open innovation yields best results when applied as a repeatable process within the organization.
Open innovation is not a one-size-fits-all solution.  Depending on what your company needs are, customize each challenge in order to source the right innovative solutions to the problem.
Open innovation challenges will match you with talent that may never come under your radar. By centering the challenges on the problem you aim to solve, you convert them into a marketplace of potential employment, for both you as an employer and solvers as potential employees, whom conventional recruitment channels may never reach.

And so, if you’re a student:


Consider solving problems posed via open innovation challenges to demonstrate to your potential employers what you can solve and the value you bring to the table for  them.

What about you? What learnings did you take from this conversation? Feel free to share them with us at thesolversedge@kaptivategroup.com. We would love to hear from you.   In the interim, follow us on Spotify, or Apple Podcast, or Google Podcast and subscribe to our newsletter so you do not miss out on our next episodes.