What if the solution to your company's most stubborn technical problem was already sitting in someone else's industry, waiting to be borrowed?
That's the central premise behind InoCrowd, and it's one that Soraya Gadit, the company's founder and CEO, has spent 15 years turning into a repeatable system. In her conversation on the HeroX Speaker Series, Gadit walks through how open innovation has quietly become one of the most reliable tools in an organization's arsenal and why most companies are still sleeping on it.
From Pharma to Platform
Gadit's origin story starts in pharmaceutical research, where she watched brilliant scientists spend years working on problems that, elsewhere in the world, had already been partially solved. The fragmentation frustrated her.
"If Facebook connects families and LinkedIn connects professionals," she recalls thinking, "why can't we connect the world's brightest minds to cure diseases like cancer?"
That question became InoCrowd: a platform that connects organizations facing hard problems ("Seekers") with a global network of over one million domain experts ("Solvers") across industries. The results come back in 30 to 60 days, at a fraction of traditional R&D costs.
The Case That Stuck
The story Gadit shares about a major Portuguese airport is the kind that makes you stop and rethink how problems get framed in the first place.
For 25 years, aircraft were losing GPS signals upon landing. Engineers investigated. The airport invested. Nothing worked. Then InoCrowd opened the challenge to their solver network, and a researcher from the defense sector spotted something the aviation team had never considered: a nearby ship port radar was causing electromagnetic interference. The fix was a 15-degree rotation of the radar antenna.
Zero hardware costs. Twenty-five years of a mystery, solved.
"Why are you trying to discover something that has already been discovered, perhaps in aviation, when you can integrate that knowledge into the automobile sector?"
This is the cross-industry knowledge transfer that makes open innovation so powerful. The airport's engineering team wasn't underqualified. They were simply too close to their own domain to see what someone outside it could spot immediately.
The Metric That Actually Matters
Most innovation platforms measure success by the number of submissions received or the quality of the match between a Seeker and a Solver. InoCrowd measures something harder to achieve.
"Success is an endpoint that is very difficult to accomplish. For us, it is critical to have not only a match, but also that the solver can implement that solution."
This distinction separates a good idea from a real result. InoCrowd reports a 95% implementation success rate, which Gadit attributes to how carefully they guide Seekers in selecting the right Solver from the shortlisted options. A technically brilliant solution means nothing if the organization can't or won't actually deploy it.
For innovation leaders, this is worth sitting with. How many vendor partnerships, consultant engagements, or internal R&D sprints end with a report on a shelf? Implementation is the finish line, and most processes aren't designed with it in mind.
The Cost of Standing Still
One of Gadit's sharper points in the conversation is about how organizations miscount the cost of unsolved problems.
"Every day they are not solving that problem, they are spending money on not having a solution. They are losing money."
The traditional framing treats the cost of innovation as the investment required to find a solution. Gadit flips this: the real cost is the daily drag of the problem going unresolved. When you factor in that InoCrowd's model can be up to 50 times cheaper than conventional R&D, the risk calculation changes entirely.
What COVID Proved
Gadit points to the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines as an accidental proof of concept for open innovation at scale. Governments, private companies, research institutions, and universities collapsed their usual silos and shared data at a speed that would have seemed impossible in 2019. The result was vaccine development in under a year, compared to a historical average of a decade or more.
Her question for the audience: why does it take a global emergency to work this way? The same collaboration that accelerated COVID vaccine timelines could be applied to oncology, climate, rare disease research, and dozens of other fields where the status quo of siloed R&D is costing lives along with money.
For Solvers: The Other Side of the Equation
For the engineers, researchers, and domain experts in the audience, Gadit makes a point worth noting. The reward for participating in open innovation challenges isn't only the prize money. When your solution gets implemented, you see real-world impact. And those engagements frequently turn into ongoing consulting relationships, because organizations that have seen what you can do want more of it.
The HeroX and InoCrowd partnership, which has been active since 2017, reflects this dual mission: HeroX brings scale and reach to challenges, while InoCrowd provides the structured, expert-filtered process that turns a broad crowd into a focused implementation pathway.
Ready to see how open innovation could accelerate your toughest problems? Watch the full conversation with Soraya Gadit on the HeroX Speaker Series, and learn how to build a 95% implementation success rate into your next innovation challenge.
