Boulder-Based Start-Up To Debut New Social Innovation Platform

Online, June 3, 2010 (Newswire.com) - The social innovation team at Napkin Labs will be officially launching its second-generation innovation platform on Fri. June 18, 2010.

After testing the first platform, Napkin Labs was able to identify areas within the discussion and innovation forums that could be improved for usability. Now, using the new proprietary software, Napkin Labs community members and clients will be able to interact effortlessly to generate innovative ideas about products and services.

Napkin Labs is a social innovation platform and global community that allows companies to engage in dynamic, collaborative, real-time conversations with either a curated community of consumers or their own custom community. The goal at Napkin Labs is to create a model of open innovation that not only incorporates the benefits of collaboration and teamwork in forming solutions to complex problems, but that is also sustainable in terms of offering incentives to all contributors.

The new platform will incorporate a complex algorithm that allows Napkin Labs to track all activity and contributions within the project space so users can be paid based on how much influence they had on the final idea. With the help of analytics tools, Napkin Labs will also be able to break through the noise and more effectively manage the mass amounts of ideas.

"Working with Fortune 500 companies," said Riley Gibson, founder of Napkin Labs, "we were experiencing the need for alternative tools to accelerate the research and innovation process."

The team at Napkin Labs was able to accommodate this need with the help of the geniuses at Quick Left, a web-engineering firm in Boulder that specializes in compliant front-end engineering and custom application development. Napkin Labs users can now focus on innovating and collaborating through the platform's modular phases of discussion, ideation, and concept refinement and companies can easily post projects and questions on topics ranging from solutions for the Gulf oil spill to creating more effective child car seats.

"Building the Napkin Labs platform was very exciting for us," said Quick Left's president, Collin Schaafsma. "Anytime we get to translate robust business requirements into smart software is a real joy for the whole team."
For this project, the Quick Left team architected a thorough application stack that focused on security, scalability and flexibility. The system comprises of a RESTful API that handles all the complex business rules that make the platform so engaging. With all the heavy lifting centralized, Napkin Labs can easily deploy white-labeled clients that connect seamlessly to the platform and allow Napkin Labs to roll out new features and advancements to their clients instantly.