The Open Innovation Platform was established in 2018 as part of Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) of Singapore’s mission to help businesses digitalise. It is a crowdsourcing platform that matches organisations such as SMEs, enterprises and government agencies with complex business problems with tech innovators, startups and researchers to co-create innovative solutions for streamlining process, improving engagement, automation, for example.

The Open Innovation Platform provides a high-touch, structured process to help organisations kickstart their open innovation journey. We diagnose their business and refine their problem statements and host it on our platform to invite proposals. We also provide additional capability development programmes in Design Thinking and UI/UX to improve the solution, and a digital prototyping sandbox to accelerate the solution-development process.

The Open Innovation Platform has become Singapore’s national platform for digital innovation, and has welcomed global companies and tech providers. We have hosted over 250 problem statements with more than S$8.5 prize monies and more than 11,000 solution providers. This is a mark of the value it has brought to businesses and tech innovators. We continue to catalyse demand-led innovation in digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and cybersecurity.

https://www.openinnovation.sg/imda

• International

• Youth
• Older persons
• Women
• Indigenous and nomadic peoples
• People with disabilities
• The unemployed
• The poor
• Migrants
• Refugees and internally displaced people
• Remote and rural communities
• Technology solution providers (start-ups, companies, researchers) that can innovate digital solutions to meet the needs of end-users End-user organisations looking for to innovate digital solutions to solve their business problems

Our programme follows a highly structured process. Putting this on a platform also means that we can replicate at scale for end-user organisations and technology solution providers. We have already hosted over 250 challenges by end-user organisations.

Yes, as we have digitised the process by leveraging a digital platform.
The programme also has a “Digital Bench” feature that speeds up the solution development process by providing digital tech assets that can be re-used by tech developers. Instead of spending time and resources to rebuild common tech components, the Digital Bench brings these tech modules into a sandbox environment, allowing every tech developers on the programme to access them.

The OIP is an open and public platform which is free for all to use, regardless of sector, size, type, or origin of companies. We believe in innovation for all and thus companies do not have to pay for the support we provide (e.g. consultancy, capability-development programmes, facilities). This gives all organisations an equal chance of digitalising their business. We also strongly believe in open innovation. Thus, the solution development is not done in isolation, but we bridge the organisation and tech solution provider as a platform, to co-create the solution collaboratively. Both parties have a shared ownership over the final solution to ensure that it is innovative and solves real-world business needs.