Dynamic Intermediate Floor for Transport Boxes

Recently the first challenge on swip.world has been successfully completed. The challenge creator uses a foldable transport box, in which the groceries are also presented in the supermarket, without the need to remove the items from the boxes. Now, however, it is uncomfortable for customers to get to the items in the lower part of the box. This is why the challenge creator is looking for a adjustable intermediate floor that can easily and continuously be lifted while the box is being emptied by customers, so that the products are always conveniently reachable for the customers at the top level.

In a first attempt to reach such a dynamic intermediate floor, the challenge creator have been working together with a University of Applied Sciences: students have worked out many solutions and then built three prototypes. However, these failed to meet the following three requirements, which are placed on such an intermediate floor: firstly, the construction must not exceed a height of 3 cm while folded, requires secondly in a difficult to raise high initial force, which is needed at the beginning of the elevation and thirdly a high degree of stability, as payloads of up to 200 kg should be possible. After this failure of the project it was declared as insoluble and therefore abandoned.

Open Innovation Challenge on Swip.world

Well, it was at the Kickstarter Accelerator final party last year when someone from swip.world (not yet online at that time) told of the platform and got into a conversation with someone who was involved in the project with the dynamic intermediate floor. So it came to pass that, together with swip.world, the project was nevertheless taken up again – because the challenge creator had nothing to lose. Without any great expectations on the side of the challenge creator, the Open Innovation Challenge on swip.world was created.

In a first initiative on the part of swip.world, in order to make the challenge known and to reach potential contributors, it was spread in the Impact Hub net. This is a global network of individual so-called Impact Hubs: office space for small businesses and freelancers, as well as ecosystem for networking and cooperation. Subsequently, the challenge was also published on other platforms. There were also collaborations with the innovation platforms Atizo and Crowdwerk, mixed experiences have been made. It was only when the challenge was advertised on LinkedIn that a lot of people could be reached and also be brought on the platform; especially with advertising in countries with lower wage levels, since the prize money of the challenge is much more attractive. During the project, when the contributions were submitted, it became clear how important the contact between the customer and the participants is; that questions are being asked and also answered.

Innovative Setup

The result of the challenge exceeded the expectations of both the challenge creator as well as of swip.world: More than 40 solutions were received and about half of them met the conditions! This success is not least because of the innovative setup of the challenge. The entire challenge was divided into three phases. In a first phase – that which is now completed – ideas were collected and market research done. Based on these approaches, concepts are developed in a second, also public phase, from which the best is/are implemented and tested as (a) prototype(s) in a third, now no longer public phase.

Contrary to certain other open-innovation projects, in this first phase the contributions were visible to all participants, in order to encourage cooperation; to enable combining already existing ideas. Accordingly, the evaluation of the contributions was also very demanding: how valuable are additions or further developments of already submitted solutions? In the second phase, however, the contributions are no longer visible, since a lot more work has to be invested in the concept development.

In addition to the setup of the challenge, also the award criteria of the prize money were unusual: not only the winners were rewarded, but also the first 20 participants whose contributions fulfilled the conditions; They received compensation money. Apart from the prize money, the winners (within the framework of the gamification system, which is integrated into the platform) will be rewarded with contribution points – in addition to those they have already received for the contribution. This is interesting in that swip.world lets the top users, measured by the contribution points, participate in the success of the platform. And because transparent communication is not only important during the runtime of the challenge, the winners were deliberately declared openly.

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