The global open innovation marketplace, and Nature Publishing Group (NPG), a leading scientific and medical publisher, today announced a partnership to facilitate greater scientific collaboration and open innovation.

Under the agreement, InnoCentive and NPG will work together to stimulate the involvement of scientists worldwide in solving global scientific challenges, via an online marketplace for problems and their solutions. The concept of "open innovation" addresses the research challenges that organizations face, by using external expertise to solve problems and drive development of new products and technologies. Global challenges such as the development of better protection against malaria, finding ways to shorten the clinical trials process and the design of environmentally friendly, sustainable product packaging, to name a few, require broad and diverse expertise.

InnoCentive's open innovation web site provides a platform for organizations, companies and government agencies (known as 'Seekers') to post innovation 'Challenges' for the public (known as 'Solvers') to solve for financial reward. NPG and InnoCentive intend to jointly produce an online platform for open innovation challenges in the coming months, to facilitate the participation of NPG's large expert audience.

"NPG's flagship journal Nature has for nearly 150 years been at the forefront of bringing significant advances in science to the attention of the research community and the public, and strives to be an integral part of the scientific community, aiding collaboration and the spread of knowledge. For large global challenges like infectious diseases and climate change, it makes sense to cast the net as wide as possible to find experts who can solve a problem," said Steven Inchcoombe, Managing Director, Nature Publishing Group. "Through this partnership with InnoCentive, Nature Publishing Group hopes to explore how we can help increase the chance of solving these global problems. We look forward to working with InnoCentive to promote the expertise of scientists and bring benefits to the wider community."

This agreement comes at a pivotal time when businesses, especially those in life sciences, are endeavoring to maintain research and development activities with reduced budgets and resources. The partnership of NPG and InnoCentive will accelerate the uptake of open innovation as a complementary business model that has particular appeal during a global economic downturn.

"Nature is one of the most well-known scientific publications on the market and this partnership boosts awareness of the benefits of open innovation within the scientific community," said Dwayne Spradlin, CEO of InnoCentive, Inc. "It is imperative for companies to engage in open innovation for many reasons, including cost savings and improving lead times to development. Nature Publishing Group has been a pioneer in their use of Web 2.0 tools to interact with their community. We look forward to working with them."

Further details will be announced in due course.

About Nature Publishing Group (NPG):

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, dedicated to serving the academic, professional scientific and medical communities. NPG's flagship title, Nature, was first published in 1869. Other publications include Nature research journals, Nature Reviews, and a range of prestigious academic journals including society-owned publications. NPG also provides news content through Nature News. Scientific career information and free job postings are offered on Naturejobs.

In recent years, NPG has developed a reputation for innovation, using Web 2.0 technologies to foster new forms of scientific communication and collaboration. Examples include the social bookmarking service Connotea, which enables researchers to share, find, and organize articles of interest. Meanwhile, NPG's professional networking website for scientists, Nature Network, helps scientists to meet, communicate and collaborate.

NPG is a global company with principal offices in London, New York and Tokyo and offices in Basingstoke, Boston, Buenos Aires, Delhi, Hong Kong, Madrid, Melbourne, Munich, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul and Washington DC.

About InnoCentive

Founded in 2001, InnoCentive built the first global web community for open innovation, enabling scientists, engineers, professionals and entrepreneurs to collaborate to deliver breakthrough solutions for R&D-driven organizations. InnoCentive Seekers, who collectively spend billions of dollars on R&D, submit complex problems to the InnoCentive Marketplace where more than 170,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, business people, and research organizations in more than 175 countries are invited to solve them. Solvers who deliver the most innovative solutions receive financial awards ranging up to US$1,000,000. InnoCentive's Seekers include commercial, government and non-profit organizations such as Avery Dennison, Procter & Gamble, Pendulum, Eli Lilly and Company, Janssen, Solvay, SAP and The Rockefeller Foundation.

InnoCentive and InnoCentive Challenge are registered trademarks of InnoCentive, Inc. Other product or service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

For more information contact:
Grace Baynes
Corporate Public Relations, Nature Publishing Group
+44 (0)20 7014 4063