Ennomotive is a global community that connects motivated engineers that provide innovative solutions for companies in the field of engineering. Area 31 interviewed its CEO Enrique Ramirez to gain insights into the extraordinary platform that they have created.

How does Ennomotive work?

Firstly, companies post their challenges and “solvers” start working on theconcept to solve the challenge. At this stage, creativity and experience are valued, and here is where users start competing among themselves. Once we know that the probability of solving the challenge is very high, we move on to a stage where designing and budgeting calculations are made. The majority of our prizes are monetary, however, we have other types of rewards. For instance, the reward from a social project with Acciona was a provision of authority to the engineer through social networks or the website due to the solving of the challenge. For the time being, we are providing employment to a lot of people. We want to create an ecosystem where everybody wins.

How did you get the idea of Ennomotive?

We started developing Ennomotive in an unstructured way with a couple of friends. One of the first ideas that we came up with, was to connect companies with the right knowledge. Our first target was to provide companies with retired people´s knowledge.  Nevertheless, the idea later evolved into providing  companies with unlimited knowledge from all parts of the world in the form of challenging competitions; and thus Ennomotive was borned.

What have you achieved since you launched the product and what were the steps?

We already have 10 companies posting challenges since we launched, such as Indra, and some others who prefer not to be mentioned. First, we needed to sign up companies to the platform and sign contracts with them so that they began to publish innovative challenges in Ennomotive. Following that, what was needed was people that signed up to those challenges, so that we could connect the great talent with the companies.  At the moment we count with 2.000 “solvers” who are the ones that provide the innovative solutions. They may be freelancers, startups, or engineers that work full time in these projects. For moment, we have validated the concept and we have been able to create a sense of community while building solutions and providing a learning factor for our users. 

Who is your competition and what makes you different?

There is no competition as such in Spain, however there might be some alternative models such as the ones that search for new technology through patents. In an international level, there are other platforms that deal with other industries. For instance Innocentive (which stands for stimulated innovation) is one of them. They were born in pharmaceutical laboratories as a community of scientifics that innovate in the field of pharmacy and their projects are related with R+D. In terms of Crowdsourcing there are some such as Kaggle in the field of Big Data. Nonetheless, Ennomotive focuses on the industrial operations. At the moment we have 10 projects and we already have some companies that would like to repeat and  keep creating challenges with us, which greatly benefits our company. Our main objective is to have large clients who use Ennomotive in an ongoing basis.

 What would you say was the hardest thing?

It was probably to find the right people, at the required perseverance needed in order to succeed in building a company.

How do you see your company in 5 years?

Ennomotive has a local focus for the moment. However in five years time, we hope to have expanded globally and to be working with some international companies. Our first target for our international expansion is the US. We also hope to have increased the amount that is offered in our monetary prizes and to have around 100.000 engineers. Our goal is not to have 3 millions engineers, but rather a smaller group of bright and motivated engineers that our loyal to the platform. We aim to make the existent process faster and more efficient, in order to create something very different from what we have in the market.

What would you say is the biggest leasson you have learned while running Ennomotive?

Patience, and of course the knowledge of how to build a company from the very beginning. It is incredible to see that you are suddenly capable of doing anything that you set your mind to. You see that getting to all of the CEOs of large companies is feasible. 

What has Area 31 meant for you?

As we are a B2B, Area 31 has surrounded us with their recognized name. It is very difficult to create a valuable brand from scratch, so that companies are willing to take risks with you from the very beginning, therefore they have helped us to achieve a level of outside recognition. On the other hand, we could consider that we are a little bit grey, and Area 31 has provided us some color due to the young culture that characterizes the incubator. 
What are you most proud of?

Something very inspiring for me, is when you see a Swedish student competing with an American one on the same project when they  come from different fields, disciplines, cultures...When we pitch to large companies, they are surprised by the diversity and the sense of community that we have been able to create, we even have some startups on robotics from Egypt competing in Ennomotive!