Intropia contest within the Interra International innoforum

Intropia, the competition of innovative projects and ideas on crowd sourcing technologies starts on June 20. Crowd sourcing is the practice of obtaining necessary services (ideas, projects, ready-made solutions) by means of requests for assistance addressed to large groups of people.

The 2012 Forum works in the lab format, its activities are to result in projects and ideas having practical, applied value. Therefore, the contest objective is to find solutions to obvious problems that create significant inconvenience for the citizens (traffic jams, icing, heat savings, lack of motivation not to litter the streets, etc.). The Intropia competition customer is regional and municipal authorities, as well as the business community representatives. At the moment, seven ministries and departments of the Novosibirsk regional Government have filed the applications for the participants. 28 development zones are defined, the contest participants are invited to solve 35 problems - not only technological, but also motivational and managerial.

Maxim Markov, Interra Forum Program Director, noted that today there are many well-known examples of crowd sourcing - from Linux operating system to the legislation (the Constitutions of Iceland and Estonia), the crowd sourcing practice is actively used by such companies as Procter & Gamble, IBM, in this country the technology is used by Sberbank and Alfa-bank, the activity of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives is based on crowd sourcing.

Intropia Competition aims at forming a regional crowd sourcing platform, the system that includes selecting the expert body, creating projects database, developing the scheme of the orders’ publication and getting the solutions ready for the implementation. Ideally, according to the organizers, the regional crowd sourcing platform scheme should look like this: problem definition - formulation of the task - formation of an idea and / or a project - investment, grant, or government support for the project implementation.

On the one hand, the crowd sourcing platform is to work with the maximum practical benefit, but on the other - the state is to be made the main customer of the innovation, the competition organizers believe. We can already say that Intropiya pursues a preemptive tactic, as the tasks are formulated in accordance with the Innovation Russia-2020 strategy and contain strict requirements for energy efficiency, sanitary-hygienic standards, ecological compatibility, labor efficiency and productivity, etc.

35 tasks have already been published at the site of the contest. Candidate solutions will be received from June 20, and the accepting deadline is on August 15. The expert committee will select applications for further analysis and will announce the leaders on September 15. The rating winners on the basis of the expert committees’ assessments will have an opportunity to implement the project within the current task, the combined rating winners will receive the grant of the International Innovation Forum Interra.