Estonian Guaana develops a global community for innovation

    The Estonian startup Guaana has been avoiding the spotlight successfully in 2015 though they even got selected in the top 30 of Arctic15 OP pitching competition this spring. Now the company founded in 2014 by Marko Russiver and Edgar Aronov reveals that they’re building a platform for open innovation.

    Guaana’s platform is a place where scientists, pioneers, visionaries and change-makers can build open communities around their research and vision. The goal of their platform called ‘Guaana Moonshot’ is to enable technology transfer through crowdsourcing.

    “We were building the perfect team and doing our research about the global interdisciplinary collaboration patterns. We talked with CERN, NASA, Oxford, Google and top scientists around the world to pick their brains,” says Russiver about developing their concept.

    “We spent 8 months researching without starting the development phase, because there was no documentation and proper statistics available about the collaborative research habits of the world,” adds Edgar and clarifies that this itself validated the idea of Guaana.

    As Open Innovation is a constantly growing market, the co-founders say revealing the concept in public and opening their platform for testing purposes is the first step of their ‘long plan ahead’. What they want to bring to the market estimated to be worth around $5,7 billion in 2015 is a platform for open innovation – not a service.

    “Average cost of an Open Innovation project is approximately €43 000 right now if you want to post an ideation to any existing services. This cost is completely unrealistic for a recently founded start-up to pay and these are they guys and gals who need to get specific problems solved as quickly as possible. Big companies have innovation divisions, but start-ups ARE the innovation divisions by definition,says Russiver.

    “We are bringing down the cost and redesigning the whole process so the most innovative companies of the world, the start-ups, can actually tap in to the global expert knowledge. And This is the next step in development – Guaana Ideation,Edgar adds.

    Right now the company is in the process of closing a €500 000 seed round with investors from Estonia, Finland and Sweden – So we’re excited to hear what will be Guaana’s next step.