Member Article

Indiegogo providing new crowdfunding venture to bigger businesses

Indiegogo, one of the largest fund-raising sites, on Wednesday announced “enterprise crowdfunding,” a new offering for big brands. The new offering will provide large corporations with specific services for engaging with Indiegogo’s vast audience of early adopters, entrepreneurs and makers to validate and optimize product concepts, as well as source new innovations.

Indiegogo’s global platform provides a unique new ability for companies to mitigate a key risk factor in their R&D efforts – whether consumers actually want a certain product. Because Indiegogo enables consumers to vote with their dollars and provide input before a product is manufactured, top global brands are increasingly relying on Indiegogo to source, validate and launch innovative customer-driven products faster and with less risk than ever before.

To assist large corporations in effectively leveraging this new toolset for product development and marketing purposes, Indiegogo’s Enterprise Crowdfunding provides strategy, hands on support, promotions and analytics tailored for the specific needs of established businesses.

“We created Indiegogo to empower anyone, anywhere to raise funds for their ideas, from the inventor working out of her garage to the largest Fortune 500 companies looking to create innovative new products that line up with what customers really want,“ said Indiegogo CEO Slava Rubin. “Some of the world’s most successful companies are already using Indiegogo for product development, market research, and to support causes important to them. Now we’re taking that a step further with Enterprise Crowdfunding.“

With the introduction of Enterprise Crowdfunding, industry leaders such as Shock Top, GE Appliances (NYSE: GE), Harman International Industries (NYSE: HAR), and Hasbro (NASDAQ: HAS) are all announcing new milestones in their Indiegogo campaigns:

After raising more than $3 million and acquiring over 8,000 customers from its first two Enterprise Crowdfunding campaigns, GE’s FirstBuild has successfully manufactured its first crowdfunded product – the Paragon Induction Cooktop, which will be shipped to funders this month. FirstBuild and Indiegogo have also partnered to develop the first ‘Guide to Enterprise Crowdfunding,’ which will be released at CES and includes lessons learned by FirstBuild in their two campaigns last year.

Harman International Industries (NYSE: HAR) will launch an Indiegogo campaign to evaluate the market potential for a new selective noise cancellation technology for its line of JBL headphones. This technology, called Audio Augmented Reality (AAR), will allow users to selectively cancel unwanted noise and enhance the sounds they need or want to hear most. For example, AAR can alert a jogger to danger, such as a barking dog, or allow someone studying to cancel noise from a car alarm outside their apartment. AAR will empower headphone users by giving them selective control over their auditory environments to create safer and more enjoyable experiences. Interested parties can sign up here for updates customizeyoursoundscape.com.

Hasbro recently wrapped up its first crowdfunding gaming challenge, selecting the fast-paced family friendly card game “Irresponsibility” as its grand prize winner. Building on the success of its first challenge, Hasbro is actively planning future challenges for 2016. Shock Top helped pioneer Indiegogo’s new enterprise platform with its ‘Shock the Drought’ initiative that launched in August 2015 to identify, fund and bring new water-saving technologies to market in response to the California drought. Launching at CES, Shock Top is helping fuel another water-saving invention called Droppler, an innovative water sensor and app that tracks and sets daily water goals, with $50,000 in funding along with campaign and marketing support including a professionally-produced video. Droppler and other ‘Shock the Drought’ funded products, including EvaDrop and Drop-A-Brick, will be featured inside the Indiegogo booth at CES.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Simon Oliver .