A few years ago, Walid Ahmed and Sandro Morghen met at a Swiss innovation consulting firm and idea factory “BrainStore” and conducted around two hundred innovation consulting projects for clients across the world. During this period, they learnt a lot on how to come up with inspiring and productive ideas. When they started conducting these innovation processes, web based applications hadn’t evolved in a way they have today. But as the web based technology evolved, Walid and Sandro realized that it was about time to transform their experience into “a great web application for structured brainstorming” and founded Yutongo. Yutongo has evolved from the personal experiences of Walid and Sandro who, for the last 15 years in over 600 ideation projects for 200 customers worldwide, have developed and used a process similar to that of yutongo that offers a live/offline-setting. After completing a small seeding round, they “have finalized our first platform in the beginning of 2014 and are improving it since.”
Yutongo is “a compelling, creativity-driven web application for structured and guided brainstormings” that forces brainstorming participants to think out of the box. “Yutongo is our initiative to digitize this process approach and make it available in the shape of a compelling web service.” Sandro tells us. Web based innovation tools have been around for about 7 – 9 years. However, over the years, these tools haven’t evolved much and most of them haven’t really changed themselves in terms of features and functionality. “We found it (and still find it) very hard to convince seed investors but also potential customers that there is a need for a tool that looks at web based innovation from a completely different angle as yutongo does.” says Sandro. He adds, “It is as if innovation around innovation tools has stopped 9 years ago and that there isn’t room for more innovation.”
Every business in the world needs ideas and innovations. They need to come up with new product ideas, new technologies, applications of technologies, names, marketing initiatives and also innovative solutions for business processes. Although there are a number of web based innovation management solutions in the market, “most competitor tools are good at collecting existing ideas from a crowd or from a staff crew, but don’t support or inspire idea contributors in the idea making process to come up with creative, truly innovative ideas. Also they are difficult and expensive to use.”
Yutongo follows a new and radical approach. With yutongo, a creative problem is instantly looked at from many different angles in order to maximize the variety of the ideas collected.
Yutongo offers a two-phased idea creation project. Sandro says, “In the first phase, idea contributors will contribute what we like to call “Idea fragments” based on a set of creativity triggering questions (or subtasks) which are individually defined for each project. In the second iteration, the same participants will be confronted with all collected idea fragments of all idea contributors in a playful manner and will create specific idea combinations based on that.”. He adds, “This unique, beautiful and powerful process approach guarantees a maximum amount of quality ideas in record time.” On yutongo, users are invited to join a “fun and engaging step-by-step process that keeps the fire for the creative task alive among idea contributors.” Brainstorming with yutongo is fun!
Yutongo’s competitors are innovation management tools like brightidea.com, hyve.de, hype.de, imaginatik, Spigit and more. “The market for web based innovation management tools is still developing, but these are the tools that are recognized best for web based innovation tasks at present, that’s why we see them as our competitors.” says Sandro. Other competitors include uservoice, ideascale and getsatisfaction.
Yutongo aims to be the leading online brainstorming web application. “Our goal is to be what Basecamp is for project management or Salesforce for CRM.” reveals Sandro. He adds, “As far as it goes for the business field of web based innovation tools, we are looking at 0.5 to 1.5 Billion US$ market potential. The market is still unconsolidated and we see great opportunities for an unique approach like what yutongo offers.”Yutongo targets individuals or teams in smaller companies and startups as well as corporates and within brands, who are confronted with creativity and innovation related tasks. Additionally, the advertising and innovation agencies too can use yutongo for their client projects.
Monetization is taken care of in two ways –
1. Freemium model (premium plans start from 24$/month)
2. Commissions from compensations of brainstorming participants. “When owners offer a compensation to innovators registered on our platform who participate in his/her idea challenge, we charge a 30% commission on all wages.” Sandro tells us.
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Do watch this video which gives a great overview on the beauty of yutongo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W46SHqVSCvM
Also, please make it a point to visit https://www.yutongo.com/
