We do this through two patent-pending innovation products that leverage our expertise in behavioral profiling for innovation:
Why does this matter? Because new product development at large companies is slow, expensive, and fails 80% of the time. Moreover, in spite of spending more than half their operating budgets on payroll, large companies lack a way to detect innovative talent within their own workforce.
We cut the innovation cycle to half the time and cost.
Our founder, being raised in Silicon Valley since before it was even called that, has vast marketing strategy and product development experience and started the business in her garage. Totem eventually became Swarm Vision.
In a time when large companies are under unprecedented pressure to innovate, Swarm Vision unlocks one of the unsolved mysteries of innovation: identifying and harnessing the innovation talent of the world.
How are we revolutionizing corporate innovation inside and out? Read on to find out!
First we created SwarmVision.com, a global crowd of proven innovators in 106 countries.SwarmVision.com discovers, nurtures and harnesses innovation talent around the world. Large companies can tap SwarmVision.com to source cutting-edge innovations EXTERNALLY. SwarmVision.com connects talent to opportunity, and along the way, is already transforming lives from Colorado to Cameroon.
SwarmVision.com is the only crowdsourcing community in the world that qualifies crowd members on their ideation skills, yielding a significantly more productive innovation crowd than ever before possible. We have quickly grown to nearly 20,000 loyal members in 106 countries.
Fortune 100s & The Struggle to Innovate
Large companies, the global Fortune 500, are generally set up to deliver consistent but modest growth every year. A $50B company has to grow by $5B a year, and they can’t do that without innovating. They all want to innovate faster, better, and you guessed it, more predictably.
We can crowdsource hundreds of ideas from hundreds of countries in a matter of weeks, achieving more than a company could by themselves in a year. At the same time, SwarmVision.com is transforming lives by connecting innovation talent, wherever that might be, to innovation opportunity.
In short, we’re bringing automation and repeatable processes to product innovation, thereby reducing new product cycle times to half.
Why Crowdsourcing Works
Why do people join SwarmVision.com? We asked them, and they said they feel curious about their innovation profiles, validated and empowered if they do test as an innovator, and feel proud and empowered when they contribute to innovation challenges. They say SwarmVision.com makes them learn and grow as innovators, which is perhaps why we have experienced such a low churn tate so far. Our crowd is hungry for innovation training — they want to be grow, be recognized and make even more of an impact in the world than they already do.
How It Works
We create a brief to summarize the company’s innovation challenge, and the target customer. We then activate our global crowd of innovators to solve the problem. They generate new product concepts over the course of several weeks. Our internal team, as well as subject matter experts, constantly encourage the crowd to hone their ideas.
Innovation isn’t just an external process, however; it also requires tapping the talent hiding under the roofs of the world’s largest companies.
While SwarmVision.com is our EXTERNAL crowd, our second product is an INTERNAL innovation assessment. The Enterprise Innovation Profiler (EIP) is the only innovation assessment tool developed in Silicon Valley. It was based on our proprietary research on serial, successful innovators (not the one-hit wonders) and validated internationally.
The algorithm detects 8 innovation skill clusters and 26 sub-clusters. It uniquely identifies the full array of skills needed from ideation through commercialization, and is tuned to innovators with real world business results. It is in commercial use by Fortune 500s and is patent-pending.
In short, the Profiler detects innovation skills hiding on the payroll of large companies. Employers use the Profiler to:
Whether internally or externally, Swarm Vision, Inc. is harnessing innovation in ways never before seen.
Our products consistently deliver higher-performing innovation concepts that move faster through our clients’ stage-gating process, reducing development cycle times by half, saving money, and driving competitive advantage. Our concepts achieve greater commercial success than traditional innovation approaches. For example, we helped develop one of the largest volume innovations ever for a beer conglomerate, reducing their cycle time to 18 vs. 36 months.
We have a patent pending on both the SwarmVision crowd solution and the Swarm Innovation Profiler for enterprise. Both are already in commercial use and driving revenue. We already count as clients Fortune 500 companies in the Americas, Europe, and Africa such as Heineken, P&G, Kraft, Intel, Standard Bank, and Vodacom. SwarmVision has quickly reached nearly 20,000 members in 106 countries, with a very low churn rate (less than 500 unsubscribes).These engagements paid for the development and proof of concept. Now we are ready to “pour on the gas.”
In addition to our current customers, we are in talks with Google, BNY Mellon, Nielsen, WL Gore, Estee Lauder, Bristol Myers Squibb, AB InBev, Khan Academy, BCG, PWC, and Pfizer.
Swarm Vision and the Profiler have been featured in a number of publications including a LinkedIn post by BNY Mellon, in Innovation Management (twice),CultureVate, and on IdeaScale, the largest crowdsourcing software solution in the world with over 4 million users.
We plan to conduct several additional rounds of research for the Profiler including in additional countries, with the most innovative companies in the world, and sector benchmarking studies.
Suzan Briganti, CEO & Founder — “Miss Vision Thing”
Suzan was raised in Silicon Valley since before it was even called that. Over her 30-year career, she has purposefully married the creativity of her Silicon Valley childhood with the rigor of her East Coast degrees (B.A. University of Toronto and MBA, Boston University, summa cum laude). Prior to founding Totem, Suzan spent two-decades in new product development and marketing strategy for BBDO and Ketchum, leading F500 clients such as Bank of America and P&G.
The daughter of a physicist at SRI who would tell daily tales over the dinner table of his innovation exploits, Suzan always had a passion for anything new. Swarm Vision started as an idea on her kitchen table and quickly grew to nearly 20,000 members in 106 countries. The idea sprung from her observation of distinct types of people joining innovation challenges. The winners were rarely the “usual suspects,” but rather the nameless ones in the mailroom, the stay home mom in the deep South with an 8th grade education, or an aspiring innovator in a small village in Chile, Estonia, or Nigeria – far from the innovation centers of the world.
As the one driving the company vision, Suzan sees the pain her clients suffer and thinks of elegant, scaleable solutions. She drives product development with a fusion of engineering, design and end-user perspective, and develops and ensures a repeatable sales process. She has an astute eye for talent and has built a gifted and close-knit team.
Beth Stolrow, Global Head of Strategy — “Miss People Thing”
Beth brings decades of client-side experience in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) including Procter & Gamble, as well as biotech and apparel. A University of Chicago Business School graduate and Harvard Executive Program attendee, Beth is a massive connector, with endless contacts and energy. She is currently working on scaling the repeatable sales processes, and is tasked with reaching our revenue goals. Beth landed with Swarm Vision after “stalking” Suzan on LinkedIn. Recognizing that most Silicon Valley companies only get the tech side but rarely understand how large FMCG companies work, Beth knew that Suzan and her company “get it.” This is her dream job and she has turned down opportunities at the likes of Google to stay here.
Kathy Dechow, Head of Engineering — “The Product Guru”
Kathy has over 15 years experience in enterprise software engineering, database administration, and web application development for Fujitsu and Amdahl. An economics and systems engineering graduate from UCLA with an Oracle Master’s certificate, Kathy heads up engineering and knows Swarm Vision and the Profiler inside and out. She is responsible for development and maintenance of all of Swarm Vision’s products and websites.
Alain Samson, Behavioral Economist — “The Quant Geek”
Alain has a PhD from the London School of Economics with degrees from UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan as well. He previously worked for The Economist and Promise. Alain handles quantitative research and statistical modeling for the company’s innovation profiling tools, ensuring they uphold the highest standards of mathematical rigor. Never one to be influenced by sales or marketing speak, he keeps our products pure.
Nicolas Duminil, Head of Community — “The Crowd Builder”
Nicolas is one of the world’s true experts on crowd recruitment and activation. At Eyeka, he built the crowd of visual creatives from 10,000 to over 200,000 in 91 countries, and planned and executed SEM and social media strategies for clients such as Coca-Cola, BMW, Google, McDonalds, Nike, HSBC, Sony, DELL, E-Bay, L’Oreal, MTV, Nestle, and Danone. He has a sixth sense about how to communicate a brief and how to connect with the Swarm community.
Ohad Myer, Head of Moderation — “The Crowd Whisperer”
Ohad manages crowd moderation and has earned the love of our clients and crowd alike. He brings a track record of success managing complex crowd projects from inception to completion. At Crowdflower, Ohad planned and executed scalable crowdsourcing workflows for processing massive data projects for the likes of Google, Microsoft, eBay, and SalesForce. He is a graduate of Stanford University.