In the last years, many stories of ultra young start-up founders bringing their companies to the top of the high-tech field have made it to the headlines. Mark Zuckerberg famously (or, as some would say, “infamously”) launched facebook aged 20. While ultra-young start-up founders are very common, established companies have long resisted giving key-positions to very young leaders. But there are signals that this is changing.

This week hypios , the technological leader in Open Innovation and R&D Problem-Solving recruited the youngest TED fellow ever, the Indian inventor Apurv Mishra. At age 20, Mishra will become the company’s Vice President Strategy.

Olivier Petros, experienced top executive within bank and industry giants, as well as hypios co-founder and board member explains: « Keeping the changing mode on is a challenge when you are already the leader. Apurv’s age and style perfectly fits with hypios’ DNA : changing before others change is the only way to do it efficiently »

Apurv Mishra was born and educated in the KBK District, which he calls « one of the most backward tribal districts in Asia ». When he was just 11 years old, he got his first patent & Invention Award from India’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. He’s since been credited to many inventions (US & Indian Patents) and received many international awards, among them SIYSS Award from the Nobel Foundation at Nobel Prize Ceremony 2009. Far from being a lonely inventor, Apurv soon understood the power of great minds connected. In 2006, he founded Innovator Factor Foundation (IFF), a virtual Open Innovation think tank with 400 active members. « To be a creative, inventor or researcher is something to be proud of. But if you can’t connect to those who have the power to implement your solutions, you won’t change a thing. hypios helps by connecting the most creative problem-solvers –  be they in Kolkata or Harvard – to the large organizations where they can make a real difference. I’m joining hypios to build even more and faster channels from Solvers to Solution Seekers, and to help hypios scale to become a world-spanning community of millions of problem-solvers », Apurv Mishra states.

hypios’ President Oussama Ammar, believes that Apurv is the right antidote against the inertia that keeps companies from going open: « Open Problem-Solving is a new paradigm. Most companies still focus on internal Research & Development instead of trying to engage multiple stakeholders and innovators inside and outside their organizations. People with a background like Apurv have the boldness, insight and creativity it needs to really change the game. »

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Hypios combines intelligent crowdsourcing, competency discovery technology, and human outreach to deliver an optimal open problem-solving service. “Seekers” post R&D problems to the network and select a deadline and a price for the successful “Solver.” Hypios, which draws from a network of 950,000 experts across the world, has been solving R&D problems for global companies since 2008.

Press Contact

Hypios
Saman Musacchio
smusacchio(at)hypios(dot)com
Tel+33 1 77 13 67 79

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