CrowdServ

Incubators are organizations that support entrepreneurs on their way to self-employment through various services. For the provision of such services, incubators usually fall back on their network of specialist lawyers, tax advisors and potential investors. In practice, however, incubators' networks, especially those of small incubators, are often too small and can offer therefore only isolated and superficial expertise. Hence, the networks of individual incubators cannot always support their entrepreneurs best. This project seeks to connect several incubators and their networks via an internet platform. Together, the incubators and their networks can build a crowd community, which interacts through this internet platform, thus creating a new and more powerful value network. By including the crowd, questions and problems of entrepreneurs can be better addressed and new services for incubators can be made possible. This joint project aims to develop this virtual crowd community and the underlying technical internet platform, as well as crowd-based services. The networking of incubators would so boost start-ups and their growth chances.

The principle of "collective intelligence" has been booming since the spreading of the internet. This principle is about the coordination of decentralized and distributed knowledge and how the available collective intelligence can be harnessed. The project uses this principle to develop new offerings for incubators. The project also builds up the research findings of the MIT and the principle is applied in the context of virtual, joint innovation development.

01.06.2016 - 31.05.2019