Mindhive is a global crowdsourced consultancy and insight marketplace, connecting organisations to a global network of innovative thought leaders and the tools necessary to surface insight and accelerate innovation.
Mindhive CEO and Founder Bruce Muirhead says the innovation problems we face as individuals, businesses, educators and governments today are fast moving, distributed and complex, and to respond effectively and efficiently at scale we need to move beyond traditional consulting models.
“As a crowdsourced consultancy we tap into the latent expertise and surface insight from a diverse community of thought leaders,” he says.
“By creating a space for R&D, policymakers, businesses and the people on the ground to share insight we are able to accelerate policy development, innovation and promote collaboration across sectors and geographical borders.
“Mindhive is a place where the world’s most pressing issues can be solved by the power of many.”
Mindhive 1.0 was initially released in late 2014, with commercialisation commencing in 2017; a staged seed capital raising in late 2017 saw Advance Queensland’s Business Development Fund, Bizzell Capital Partners and a small group of investors provide seed funding.
Today, Mindhive 1.0 is a diverse, engaged and highly valuable marketplace of minds filled with talent spanning various sectors, including government, education, consulting and many more.
In its first two years, Mindhive has significantly grown in Australia and entered the market in New Zealand, with a total of 897 challenges, a Mindhive community of over 14,000 contributors, and over 794 user organisations.
Mindhive also recently won ‘Boldest Online Crowdsourced Platform’ at the BOLD Awards in Venice, in April 2019 - the same month they saw success as a top 10 finalist in the Australian finals of the Startup World Cup, held in Brisbane.
What’s next for Mindhive?
“In early 2018, based on market experience and feedback, we could see that we needed to pivot from a high touch, service based product to a scalable dual marketplace in order to realise our global growth potential,” says Muirhead.
“To do this we partnered with Josephmark, a digital ventures studio, with a proven record of building digital communities and ecosystems that scale globally.”
Mobilising collective intelligence, Mindhive has quickly become the future of surfacing insight. Their product roadmap includes a tools marketplace, which enables third-party partners to contribute their tools and services to the Mindhive platform, and a reputational design, with status mechanisms designed to incentivise engagement and participation.
Another important element is data driven intelligence and matchmaking AI, for implicit and explicit metrics drawn from participation to create automated matches, making the platform seamless.
“As we move towards the global launch of Mindhive 2.0 in June 2019, our goal is to be a world leading, Queensland innovation and problem-solving platform,” says Muirhead.
Muirhead is currently meeting with policy, innovation and global thought leadership networks across Europe, Scandinavia and the UK, including speaking engagements on the future of AI and collective intelligence at the Horasis Meeting in Lisbon, Going Global conference in Berlin and TNW 2019 in Amsterdam.
Throughout his career, Muirhead has been recognised with nine Global and Australian innovation awards for large-scale problem-solving platforms.
