Brightidea Announces the Latest Release of Its Social Innovation Management Suite

Accelerating Corporate Innovation Emerges as the "Killer App" of Social Business Software

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwire - November 2, 2010) -- Brightidea, the global leader in cloud-based Enterprise Innovation Management software, today announced the release of The Brightidea Innovation Suite™, The new, integrated offering, is the most advanced and comprehensive set of social software tools ever created for enabling companies to track their innovation pipeline from ideas to cash.

The Brightidea Innovation Suite is a Facebook-style platform specifically designed to help companies stay on top of all activities, at every stage of the innovation pipeline. The integrated nature of the suite allows for a clear hand-off between stages in the pipeline while maintaining an end-to-end system of record of all innovation-related activity.

"Most people understand: if businesses could operate more like Facebook, there is huge potential to improve communication and collaboration. But the early social software providers like Sharepoint and Jive have failed to deliver on this promise, because they failed to target a specific business processes," said Matthew Greeley, Chief Executive Officer of Brightidea. "Innovation is inherently a creative and social activity, and tracking innovation has emerged as the first 'killer app' to demonstrate the transformative impact social software will have on business."

The suite is designed to meet the needs of: Heads of R&D, Advanced Technology, Product Development, Product Management, Product Marketing, Continuous Improvement, Process Excellence, Six Sigma, Intellectual Property and Open Innovation professionals.

The Innovation Suite release is the distillation of over 10 years of experience in the field, and over a year in development. The release incorporates several thousand enhancement requests made from our customers, partners and employees. The suite includes:

• WebStorm – The industry leading online brainstorm tool has been upgraded to include: one-click creation of innovation communities, advanced idea management including clustering and collections, and best-of-breed flexibility, configurability and extensibility for custom workflows and widget layouts.
• Switchboard – Creates a next step for every idea. No longer will good ideas sit idle; with Switchboard you can convert ideas into Proposals (an industry first), set up private social collaboration rooms to allow teams to develop concepts, and leverage powerful multi-round scorecarding functionality to make better business decisions faster.
• Pipeline – Pipeline is a social project tracking tool that allows innovation teams to: share progress on key milestones and stage-gates, track financial investments and results, and create social project pages with activity feeds that make it easy to keep managers and interested parties up-to-date on progress.

Brightidea Mobile 2.0 and an upgraded API will be released simultaneously and includes advanced features such as photo attachment to idea submissions and micro-blogging.

"With this release, we are once again setting the standard by which all others will be measured." Greeley said "these are the features other vendors will be trying to copy in the coming months and years."

The Innovation Suite will be immediately available to all customers and channel partners and integrators, including: HP, IBM, Rally Software, Planview and others. With industry analysts Gartner, Forrester, Aberdeen, Deloitte and IBM expanding their coverage of innovation management's broadening market application, Brightidea is uniquely positioned to lead the category with best-in-class social software focused on transforming the social business process of innovation.

For more information on pricing and features of the Brightidea Innovation Suite contact a Brightidea Representative.

About Brightidea
Brightidea is the market leader in Cloud-Based Innovation Management. Over 300 organizations around the world use its social software suite to track their employee, partner and customer ideas as they become a reality. The Brightidea platform is a flexible, scalable, and standards-based system that provides end-to-end tracking of the innovation pipeline from idea through to cash. Brightidea's products have won numerous awards and recognition, and were recently highlighted in Gartner's Who's Who of Innovation Management. The company's software has been successfully deployed at: Adobe, Bosch, Cisco, Harley-Davidson, American Express, Emerson, British Telecom, Bristol-Myers Squibb, UBS, and many others. Founded in 1999, Brightidea is a privately held and headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, please visit http://www.brightidea.com/. Follow us @brightideahq or join the Innovation Leaders Group on LinkedIn.

Copyright © 2010 Brightidea, Inc. All rights reserved. Brightidea and the "Power of Innovation" logo are registered trademarks of Brightidea, Inc., and Brightidea owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Press contact:
Janelle Noble
Email Contact
646-502-7916

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Original Release