OmniCompete is an organisation specialising in the design and implementation of

innovation competition An innovation competition is a method or process of the industrial process, Product development, product or business development. It is a form of Social engineering (political science), social engineering, which focuses to the creation and elaborati ...

s. In February 2012 OmniCompete was acquired by

InnoCentive InnoCentive is an open innovation and crowdsourcing company with its worldwide headquarters in Waltham, MA and their EMEA headquarters in London, UK. They enable organizations to put their unsolved problems and unmet needs, which are framed as � ...

. One of the original founders went on to co-found the crowdsharing platform Zyncd in 2014.

OmniCompete

OmniCompete is an organisation specialising in the design and implementation of

s. It promotes

Open Innovation Open innovation is a term used to promote an Information Age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have b ...

through various prize challenges worldwide, offering financial rewards to successful innovators from across a diverse range of industries and sectors. Previous and ongoing competitions include the Global Security Challenge, the Energy Storage Challenge, the Cyber Security Challenge and the Health Pitch Battlefield.

History

The idea behind OmniCompete and its predecessor company, Global Security Challenge (GSC) was developed at

London Business School London Business School (LBS) is a business school and a constituent college of the federal University of London. LBS was founded in 1964 and awards post-graduate degrees (Master's degree, Master's degrees in management and finance, Master of B ...

in 2005, where the founders met during their MBAs. Simon Schneider and Janeen Chupa-Brimacombe founded the Global Security Challenge in 2006 and the competition has run annually since then. Building on this foundation in the security sector, the organisation has expanded into other areas, initiating the Energy Storage Challenge and Health Division in 2010. The umbrella company, OmniCompete Limited, was founded in 2010 and US subsidiary OmniCompete Inc. was incorporated in 2011. In 2012, OmniCompete was acquired by

Company

OmniCompete is based in

London, UK London is the capital and largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Western Europe, with a population of 14.9 million. London stands on the River Tha ...

. Its board members include the honourable H. Lee Buchanan III, who used to be Deputy Director of

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

before his current role as VC at Paladin Capital Group. OmniCompete has hosted over 20 international competitions in the areas of

security Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercion). Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems, or any other entity or ...

energy Energy () is the physical quantity, quantitative physical property, property that is transferred to a physical body, body or to a physical system, recognizable in the performance of Work (thermodynamics), work and in the form of heat and l ...

, social innovation and

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

, with over $2.9 million in prizes.

Winners and Finalists

Over the past five years, OmniCompete has awarded many prizes to a wide range of innovative startups and SMEs. Previous winners include: * Australian SME iwebgate who received the 2010 Best Security SME Prize ($300,000 prize fund) for the development of an online security product which represents a virtual, highly-secure reception area between an organisations' trusted network and volatile public networks like the Internet. * Ghanaian startup mPedigree won the Best Security Startup 2010 award - for developing the first system in the world which enables consumers and patients to verify the authenticity of their medicines by sending a free text message of the unique, product-embossed codes. * Kromek who won Best Security SME 2009 for developing a threat liquid identification system (bottle scanner) which can deal with individual containers and also a unit for screening multiple containers in a 311 bag configuration. * Ksplice, who won the 2009 Cyber Security Challenge for developing software that improves security, reliability and maintainability through seamless updates. Ksplice was recently acquired by Oracle. Winners and finalists have often secured investments and acquisition deals through their participation in OmniCompete competitions. Former Global Security Challenge finalist TenCube was recently acquired by McAfee. Vumii, Secerno and DecaWave provide more examples of finalists who have since raised significant funding.

References

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External links

* OmniCompet

* Global Security Challeng

* Energy Storage Challeng

* http://www.omnicompete.com/pitchlive.html Open innovation intermediaries Defunct companies based in London