Case Study: Syngenta achieves faster, smarter crop breeding with Wazoku open innovation

Syngenta - Customer Case Study

Syngenta Group, a global agribusiness with 28,000 employees and thousands of in-house experts, needed access to innovative data science talent beyond traditional tech hubs to improve its lengthy, costly R&D for crop breeding. The specific challenge was to create a tool that could visually represent raw field trial data, highlight anomalies, and ultimately automate data entry and interpretation to speed decision-making and reduce trial-and-error testing.

By crowdsourcing the problem through open-innovation platforms, Syngenta engaged 200+ solvers and selected a solution that automated many steps, produced clearer outputs, and let field managers quickly identify and fix trial issues. The initiative produced a suite of analytics tools that accelerated breeding improvements—raising yield gains from 0.8 to 2.5 bushels per acre—and delivered innovations that would have cost roughly $278 million to achieve through traditional methods.

Syngenta