Leading agile innovation platform helps NZHIA harness collective creativity to achieve transformational business outcomes

Portsmouth, United Kingdom — Planbox, a pioneer in agile innovation management solutions, today announced its top-ranking platform was selected to launch and run New Zealand’s first-ever Hemp Ideation Challenge by New Zealand Hemp Industries Association (NZHIA), a non-profit society that supports the growth and development of all aspects of the island country’s hemp industry, and Webtools Agritech, a leading provider of Agriculture and Transparency software solutions. 

Launched nationwide, the Hemp Ideation Challenge allowed NZHIA and Webtools Agritech to engage a multidisciplinary ecosystem of partners, researchers, industry leaders and entrepreneurs to uncover insights and collaborate on concepts in a short time frame. “We don’t have the time to reinvent the wheel, so we have to get there very quickly,” said Richard Barge, Chairperson, NZHIA.

Using the powerful AI and cognitive analytics tools of Discovery Central®—Planbox’s collaborative online breakthrough innovation framework—NZHIA tapped into the collective creativity of its ecosystem to rapidly identify 31 game-changing innovations in a fun and team-oriented environment. Some of the white space opportunities identified include groundbreaking hemp products, new uses for hemp and innovative ways to produce, process and manufacture hemp crops. 

“Planbox was crucial in providing a unique and memorable experience across an in-person and digital event,” said Melissa Baer, CEO of Webtools Agritech. “Working with the team to configure the platform for an industry objective instead of an individual company objective demonstrated the power of collaboration in an emerging industry, which is often spoken about but rarely ever accomplished. The Planbox structure facilitated a lot of cooperation and working together, and it was easy to see the size of the opportunity, which is much bigger than just New Zealand.”

Download the case study to read the full NZHIA success story.

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About Planbox

Planbox is the pioneering agile innovation management platform software provider for full lifecycle Innovation Portfolio Management, Emerging Tech Empowerment and Ecosystem Enablement. Planbox is recognized by Forrester as the top-ranking innovation management platform in the marketplace, having received the highest score in strategy and current offering in the Forrester Wave: Innovation Management Platforms, Q1, 2020. As the most robust and scalable platform on the market, we empower our clients to discover, collaborate and capitalize on the best strategically aligned concepts with their ecosystem of employees, customers, suppliers, partners, startups, academia, government and the general public to pursue breakthrough innovations, create a sustainable continuous improvement program, build a framework for corporate venturing and action on consumer insights. With over 20 years of domain expertise, 400 enterprise deployments, 5M participants and $10B of realized ROI for customers, Planbox’s AI-powered cloud-based agile innovation solutions accelerate business outcomes for some of the world’s most recognized brands, including Whirlpool, Dow, Novartis, ExxonMobil, Cargill, Bobcat, Honeywell and Sun Life.

In 2020, Planbox acquired IdeaConnection, the best-in-class open innovation platform and expert solver network. IdeaConnection by Planbox provides access to millions of diverse and brilliant minds and a global network of 20,000+ multidisciplinary experts and world-class facilitators in more than 180 countries, with an 80% solve rate for open innovation services such as public and confidential challenges, crowdsourced tech scouting and prior art search.

About NZHIA

The NZ Hemp Industries Association (NZHIA) is a non profit society registered in 1997. We are a non-profit organisation that is funded by memberships, fundraising via sponsorship from hemp business and others involved in supplying goods and services to the hemp industry, donations and koha. Our mission is to support the growth and development of all aspects of the industrial hemp industry in New Zealand, and our objectives to complete this are listed below. We intend to meet these objectives with the support and participation of industry, business and the involvement of the Government, and we will develop as an association, based on honest, hard work and the sharing of information and expertise.