Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Former FAST execs launch startup Induct

By Galen Moore

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David Burns and a pair of fellow entrepreneurs are back from Norway with a plan to change the way companies design and develop new products.

Burns, Alf Martin Johansen and Age Muren — all former executives at Fast Search and Transfer Inc., also known as FAST — have launched Induct Software AS. The new company is developing software designed to bring transparency and social media tools to enterprise innovation processes, said Burns, Induct’s new CEO.

Burns founded FAST, an enterprise search software company, after leaving Lycos Inc. in the late 1990s. The company was sold early last year to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) for $1.3 billion.

“This market is where the market for enterprise search was 10 years ago,” Burns said.

The Oslo-based company will locate all its engineers in Norway. CEO Burns and all customer-facing departments will work out of its Boston office, similar to how FAST operated with dual headquarters in Norway and the Bay State.

Induct is branding its product “open innovation software,” borrowing a term from the book of the same title, written by University of California at Berkeley professor Henry Chesbrough (Harvard University Press, 2003). Chesbrough advocated porous innovation firewalls to allow a flow of ideas into and out of the enterprise.

Induct’s system is designed to allow everyone from resellers to employees to comment and contribute in the innovation process and to preserve that history of contribution through to product implementation.

“When decisions are made in the implementation process, you can go back and look at the front end contributions before you make engineering and marketing trade-offs,” Burns said.

The software will be offered as an on-demand service, Burns said.

Induct is currently in the “friends and family” stage of financing, he said, and is approaching angel investors in Norway.

 

An earlier version of this story misstated the relationship between FAST and Lycos. Lycos was an early customer, but there was no formal partnership between the two companies.