Quirky’s mantra is to “make invention accessible” to all – and it seems to work if you judge by the success of Quirky in the United States. But as soon as you have success, you also start having competition, either globally or locally. A lot of entrepreneurs want to replicate that idea in their respective countries, adapt it, tweak it a bit.

In France, a country that pioneered the concept between 2007 and 2011 with the rise and fall of CrowdSpirit, where I also happen to live and work, collaborative innovation platforms are popping up like mushrooms. What are they called? Who are their founders? What is their model? What are they ambitions? Let’s have a look at Quirky France… and three of their challengers: Nov’in, La Fabrique à Innovations, and MyKompany.

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This post, which only features images and quotes, has originally been written for and published on InnovationExcellence.com

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Quirky: The Pioneer Who Crossed The Atlantic

In 5 years from now, we want to have strong brand identity, and we want to get an active and co-creative community, similarly to what we have in the United States (Margaux Mulliez)

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Nov’In: Probably the first challenger

Crowdsourcing took off in the US, but transposing that to France is a challenge in itself. Each country has its cultural background ; the French don’t behave like Americans (Ismaël Méïté)

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La Fabrique A Innovations: Betting on “Made In France”

We are different from Crowdspirit in that we have industrial designers to bring the products to market, we have strong investors, and we focus on local innovation and production, or Made In France (Matthieu Dupas)

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Mykompany: Social gaming paired with collaborative innovation

Our main competitor is the American Quirky, who got funded over 26 million dollars. So it’s possible [to raise a million in 2014] (Alban Guyot)

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