EarlyBirds is touting its robust open innovation ecosystem as one of the potential solutions for solving “wicked” problems, problems that are not necessarily evil but are yet highly resistant to being solved. The Australia-based innovation and collaboration platform, for startups, scaleups and mature innovators, subject matter experts is urging business and thought leaders to learn more about its award-winning platform and services and how it can drive long-term sustainable growth.

Wicked Problems Defined

The term “wicked problem” was introduced in 1967 by C. West Churchman in a guest editorial he wrote in the journal Management Science. The World Economic Forum uses wicked problems to describe challenges that have many layers to them where solving one aspect of it would complicate others. For example, COVID mask mandates were designed to fight the spread of the pandemic but the intense backlash to the enforcement of these regulations led to animosity towards the government and decreased public participation when it came time to line up for the vaccine a year later.

Wicked problems also don’t have an obvious solution as everyone with an interest in solving them looks at them from their perspectives and disregards the input of other stakeholders whose solutions are opposed to what they have prescribed. To tie this back to the COVID pandemic, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) chastized the USA for hoarding vaccines when the pandemic was raging in other, less developed parts of the world. Experts warned that this would create a situation where the virus would mutate into harsher strains the longer it persisted in parts of the world that couldn’t afford vaccines and those dangerous variants were likely to reach America’s borders, sooner or later, further exacerbating the problem.

Wicked Problems and Open Innovation

Though traditional solutions seem ineffective against wicked problems, there is hope that radical innovations can make a significant dent in their pervasiveness and the amount of damage that they do. One of the candidates to bring about this change is open innovation. Henry Chesbrough, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School, defines open innovation in a Forbes article as “the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.” This means that organizations and governments that are looking for solutions can venture beyond the limitations of their internal capabilities or borders and leverage the progress that is already being made to bolster their efforts to solve the litany of interconnected and insidious problems that they are facing.

EarlyBirds Applying Innovation to Solve Wicked Problems

EarlyBirds’ founder Kris Poria talks about the role of open innovation in solving wicked problems by saying, “The most important quality that one can have in times of adversity is to be agile and flexible. If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail but modern problems are rarely solved by brute-forcing traditional means. There are a lot of innovators all around the world that have an eye on the problems of the future and are working tirelessly right now to fight against them. They need the funds to implement their vision and you need their expertise and technology to succeed to give your business an edge. EarlyBirds has created an open innovation ecosystem where this exact intermingling of thoughts and ideas can happen. If you are an early adopter organization, we encourage you to learn more about our platform and services as we are confident that we can assist you in finding the ideal solutions to your most pressing business and public welfare challenges.”

EarlyBirds offers its platform that monitors over 4 million Innovators and the Explorer and Challenger programs that help businesses implement continuous improvement throughout their business processes and resolve business and technical challenges quickly. EarlyBirds’ Explorer program helps businesses that need innovation as a service to supplement existing innovation programs or to conduct innovation projects as required. Its Challenger program is designed to solve one business or technical challenge at a time and search for relevant innovators that meet the business, technical, commercial, and business risk requirements. The platform, including Open Innovation Map and programs give early adopters the tools needed to efficiently evaluate the feasibility of an innovators capabilities to solve the problems that are pertinent to their industry.

Readers interested in EarlyBirds’ innovation solutions can find out more about the company and its services by heading over to its website at the link: earlybirds.io.