Former FAST exec named Induct CEO
David M. Burns, former CEO of FAST Inc
OSLO, NORWAY and BOSTON, MA, USA - March 10, 2009 - Induct Software AS (Induct), "The Open Innovation CompanyT," today named David M. Burns, the original CEO of Norway's Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) Inc., as CEO of Induct.Burns brings more than 30 years of high-tech engineering, marketing, sales, business development, and executive experience to Induct. As the only American out of 30 current and previous FAST employees to receive the NTNU/SINTEF Technology Award, he was recently recognized for his role in helping to start the young company on its journey toward an eventual sale to Microsoft last year for $1.2B.
Now Burns has reunited with some early members of the FAST team. Together, they are proud to introduce Induct, the first truly integrated Web-based service that supports custom design, management, and measurement of the entire open innovation process. Induct delivers more competitive and consumer-focused products, saves money through process optimization, and enables corporate talent management for better contribution per employee.
"David was the driving force behind FAST Inc. in the early days and we believe he can bring that same energy and team building skill to Induct," said Alf Martin Johansen, Chairman and Founder of Induct. "Companies are spending billions of dollars per year on innovation, but customizable systems to manage the entire innovation process have been missing. As of today, companies have a turnkey open innovation solution that will enable them to build and manage their own Innovation Communities."
OPEN INNOVATION ARCHITECTURE
Most of today's innovation solutions are simply software versions of the old corporate suggestion box. They do a good job of supporting idea submittal, evaluation, ranking, and decision making, but they stop there. However, the toughest and most critical portion of the corporate innovation process lies in the implementation phase, an area where many innovation process failures occur.
Partial innovation solutions force companies to use disparate project management programs to manage the back-end of the innovation process. These programs are not designed to support open innovation. They can't capture the rich front-end history of the innovation process, and they don't support customization of ranking or implementation processes for different innovation types. Induct delivers a complete solution that does it all.
Induct will revolutionize the way that companies think about innovation. Based on the work of pioneering professors and consultants in the open innovation field, Induct integrates Enterprise 2.0 technology and social networking concepts with a flexible and customizable innovation process management framework. The result is a 'Software as a Service' (SaaS) platform that allows companies to easily practice true open innovation through the creation of corporate Innovation Communities.
THE INNOVATION COMMUNITY
Employees will find that the Innovation CommunityT gives them a special way to interact with their peers that is both fun and extremely beneficial to the company. It allows and encourages personnel at every level of the organization to contribute to the innovation process according to their interests and abilities. Through the Innovation Community, employee talent and contributions are maximized, and a corporate culture is developed that values and rewards participation in the innovation process.
The Innovation Community ensures that valuable ideas on new products, cost savings, and process optimization are not lost at the lower levels of the organization. With Induct, valuable input from employees at every level is instantly available across all organizational boundaries, enabling companies to engage in more collaborative decision-making. Induct ensures that key new ideas, concepts, suggestions, and recommendations are "bubbled up" for input and action by managers and executives.
In the past, participation in the innovation process has been limited to company employees. As a true open innovation platform based on social media practices, Induct changes all that. The Innovation Community has no physical limitations, and is infinitely extensible both inside and outside the company. Valuable information vital to corporate competitiveness is often available from customers, resellers, distributors, retailers, vendors, suppliers, manufacturers, contractors, agents, other companies, and even from direct and indirect competitors. Provided that proper security and permissions are granted by the company, all of these constituencies can immediately participate in the corporate innovation process. The result is increased levels of corporate creativity, communication, secure information sharing, and employee collaboration that lead to better decision making.
Induct has no organizational, geographic, or networking boundaries. Through the use of Induct's patented Innovation Community technology, every stage of the innovation process is instantly available company-wide through one consistent Web-based platform. This includes idea campaigns (challenge/ strategy, proposal, comment, evaluation, and ranking), decision, implementation process design and tracking, portfolio management, and innovation "dashboard" (statistics, measurement, and ROI).
Induct is a true 100% Web-based 'Software as a Service' (SaaS) application. There is no hardware or software to buy, and nothing to install, update, distribute, back up, or maintain. Most SaaS applications are relatively fixed in their capabilities. However, Induct's patented technology supports the real-time creation and linking of customized ranking and implementation processes to each user-defined type of innovation. The result is that better decisions get made, as each type of innovation is managed, tracked, and measured in its most optimal fashion. For example, a company might want to manage product innovation in a different way from process or organizational innovation.
Induct appeals most to companies that are, or want to become, leaders in innovation. They are ready to define innovation as a strategic priority and put innovation on the management agenda. They realize the power of open innovation, and are dedicated to creating an innovation culture by implementing a consistent company-wide innovation process. Through Induct, these visionary companies can create an Innovation Community that delivers on the promise of open innovation.
"I'm very pleased to be joining the Induct team. With companies all over the world being forced to do more with less, Induct has the opportunity to become a very large company," said David M. Burns, CEO of Induct. "My feeling is that the market for 'open innovation' is just emerging, much like the search market of ten years ago. When I started at FAST, there were just a handful of engineers in Norway. FAST went on to become a big company, and we're ready to repeat that success with Induct."
