Improving analytics capabilities through crowdsourcing

Syngenta, an agrochemical and seed company based in Basel, Switzerland, was formed in 2000 by the merger of the agribusiness units of Novartis and AstraZeneca. For centuries, plant breeding has been a labor-intensive process that depended largely on trial and error. Luck played a decisive role, as breeders relied heavily on intuition and guesswork to decide which varieties to cross-pollinate. Syngenta set out to use open innovation to harness the power of data analytics so we could identify genetic combinations that unlock desirable characteristics in soybean plants, such as the highest yield. Syngenta's vision was to create a suite of software tools that would replace intuition in plant breeding with data-backed science. The tool Syngenta envisioned would conduct what's known as a residual analysis the calculated difference between the observed value of a genetic trait and the predicted value of that trait based on a statistical model across many locations. Over the past eight years, Syngenta has used open- innovation platforms to develop more than a dozen tools in its data analytics suite.