The Business of Managing Ideas: A Conversation with Brightidea
September 9, 2010 by CSEDEV
Brightidea is one of the world's leading innovation management software companies. Founded in 1999, the company's clients have included American Express, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, and the City of San Francisco. I spoke with Janelle Noble and James Pasmantier, the VP of Brightidea's Professional Services Group, about how they've sold a product which ten years ago seemed closer to lunacy than genius. As Janelle explains, the Brightidea story is partially about "getting people to understand what it is we do." The result, including fostering greater communication and solving budget problems in both international organizations and cities, merits a closer look at the business of managing ideas.
JI: When you approach a company that's never used innovation management before, how do you explain the software?
James: There's been an evolution. Companies now are a lot more informed of the benefits than they were ten years ago. When companies would come to us before, they would start off with some less efficient methods of managing innovation, such as Excel or an active database or an email inbox. Brightidea has an easy to use interface that helps to mimic a lot of the best practices, like Dig.com. On the back-end there's a ton of functionality to route that idea through the business process. The lifecycle of the particular idea comes in as some sort of pending/new state, gets feedback from your community through votes or collaborations or builds, and then moves towards future phases, such as expert evaluation, and then through the final phases of a project, and eventual implementation.
JI: Are ‘votes' one of the ways you manage to identify people with good ideas, or set user-reputation scores?
James: We certainly have a rather in-depth point scheme related to identifying those who are the most valuable resources in the innovation realm and to your process as a whole. It could be whether they're submitting ideas that eventually get implemented, whether they're having plenty of activity within the voting and commenting, and certainly whether they are providing valuable content within each of those areas. There's a variety of stats that we do track. There's even a discretionary point structure so that leadership can recognize those folks who are providing solid content and point them in the right direction. You pull all those numbers together. We have a variety of widgets which will help report those leaders within your community so you can recognize them or reward them.
Janelle: A really distinctive feature on Brightidea's software is that it's really flexible. You can have multiple ways to calculate a user's reputation. You can decide to assign a point value to a different action within our front-end Webstorm solution, for instance. I may want to assign 5 points to commenting and 10 points to voting, and 20 to committing an idea—all of that is customizable, so you can find the right balance that's going to work for the company. Even within pure voting schemes the options are available. We offer up/down voting, but you can turn off a demote function if you want. You can give your community only a certain number of votes to use during a campaign, and that really weights someone's decision to vote on something a little more. Our front-end Webstorm tool for idea collection and initial prioritization is the most evolved tool out there in the idea management market in terms of the number of features and functionality and the level of customization. It's unmatched.
JI: You've worked for companies like Novartis and American Express. How do you meet the needs of different industries?
James: To give you a broad spectrum of two different examples, you can have a company like British Telecom, which has 140 to 150 thousand employees who all have the tool available for them to submit ideas. British Telecom is looking for radical game-changing business ideas. What's the next billion dollar idea that's really going to move the needle in terms of success for the company? At the other end of the spectrum, you'll have a company such as Harley Davidson. They'll come in and say, ‘How do we make the environment safer?' Or ‘How do we find some cost-saving initiatives to make the whole process of developing these motorcycles that much more profitable for us?' On the BT side, you'll have folks in offices regularly filling out these suggestions, and you'll have factory workers within Harley Davidson who have kiosks on the factory floor, providing those sort of inputs within there. It's not just the various industries, it's the wide variety of uses you find across these clients. And even internally within the organization.
JI: Have you done any studies or heard any feedback on if the software fosters a greater sense of community and interconnectivity between the upper levels of management and the ordinary employee? Do people feel more connected to each other through the software?
James: They do. Our research has shown that, if we think about the reward and recognition side, the reward is within the interaction that wasn't taking place already. A study conducted a few years back showed that the number two reason people leave their job is that people feel that their ideas are not being heard. Simply having the forum to contribute ideas, whether they get implemented or not, is certainly a nice attribute that people get excited about. Secondly, people want to make their jobs easier. They are identifying problems they're seeing on a daily basis. Thirdly, they have a team mentality that's in place. If they can help their company do better than the competition, they get a lot of pride and excitement about that. This gets reflected in employee feedback campaigns.
JI: To switch gears slightly, can you tell me about the city of San Francisco's initiative that utilized Brightidea's software? What have you learned from working from them?
Janelle: The City of San Francisco is a great example of an open government initiative. San Francisco is a champion of Gov 2.0, of opening things up, of making services and processes easier for citizens and employees and trying to think outside of the box on they how they can tackle this huge budget deficit that they face on a city level. When the city was thinking about new unique ways to tackle the budget crisis, they wanted to look into ways of harnessing the collective knowledge of their employees in a way that would be dramatic and have a real impact. Partnering with us, we advised them on the best practices of running successful innovation campaigns. Out of those sessions, grew the concept for Improve.SF which would be one, single campaign, with a clearly defined start and end date as opposed to a longer, on-going, open-ended initiative.
They found some unique ways to market the campaign to employees to generate buzz, including Mayor Newsom doing a video introduction. And they also put flyers in people's paychecks; I thought that was pretty ingenuous. They had amazing results—they actually extended the campaign by a couple of weeks from the initial end-date. Hundreds of ideas poured in from across the board, not only, "How can we save money?" but "How can we generate revenue?" The ideas that came in were pretty broad spectrum. They ended up choosing a couple for initial implementation and I believe are still considering some other ones. They used the back-end Switchboard tool to do the idea evaluation and decision making. Once ideas were submitted into the campaign and the community favorites got to the top, they were able to take another look at the ideas and route them to evaluators within the organization, and have those evaluators scorecard the individual ideas. They've taken into consideration what the community thinks is valuable, but at the end of the day we've found that 98% of our customers don't make business decisions solely based on the wisdom of the crowd.
...
