A lot can happen in a year!
End of Year – with Brad Roberts, Global Head of Network Platform
Xinova has seen plenty of change since I joined our predecessor company in 2010, but no year has been more important than 2018 in bringing focus and clarity to the mission that we’re on. For those of you who have been following for a while and those who are new, here’s a quick recap of what we accomplished and the groundwork that’s been laid for the future by the many capable members of the Xinova team.
The Xinova platform was re-written from the ground up. Well more than a million lines of code were replaced with barely 50k: supporting that was thoughtful design of process and features for the users who we engage with. We challenged the product and engineering team to build for the future; they delivered. Since launching in August we’ve seen increased traffic and interest, and the future suite of features that have been enabled are remarkable. Today’s site has largely replaced the functionality of the previous one, but has been built as a platform. Getting there took nearly 100 interviews with network members like you – and we’d like to hear from more of you.
With the platform, Xinova’s foundation is architected as a product company. We aim to grow significantly in the range of offerings we provide within the innovation space, and each of those will be products supported by a range of technologies and people. Our first efforts in network-driven RFX authoring and even review allow us to look at how we package and distribute access to innovators while ensuring you are seeing value for your contributions.
You’re now on this mission with us. We are a risk-sharing network, but our early life as an investment fund had a weird form of upside for our innovators. This year we replaced all of our network contracts with true revenue sharing. If the market responds favorably to your innovation, you’re going to benefit. The response to simplifying our terms has been fantastic. Thank you!
We’re about to do a whole lot more. I mentioned that this year brought focus and clarity; you’ll soon see a blog post about Xinova’s Innovation Market Network. A teaser: every successful project requires a confluence of talent (you), demand (a buyer), technology (yours and others), and capital (funds, perhaps time). Projects can exist without one for a time, but they all need a bit of each and finding the missing pieces can be challenging. 2018 brought us the ability to bring this together and set the stage to significantly reduce the friction to solve problems and support the solution. Now, good problems will still be hard to solve, but we’re cutting the overhead.
2019 will see significantly more “demand” in the form of more opportunities, more RFIs, more RFT, more RFS, and more more. By accomplishing the above foundational work, we’ve broken apart some log-jams that made our approach to innovation difficult to take a leap of faith on and instead have enabled significant levels of self-service and network effects that are already driving more partner-customer demand. Clear your schedule, we’re going to be bringing some valuable projects your way!
Interested in learning more?
Join Brad, as he takes a more detailed look back at the incredible work that you, innovators, have achieved in 2018, and how Xinova has changed and grown this past year! Brad Roberts is hosting a Year in Review webinar and will take us through the year in numbers, including selections and payments, and even give a sneak peek into 2019!