Brightidea Spring 2018 Release (ORIGINAL)

Bud break. It’s that time of year when the first leaves of spring appear, kicking off the growing season and conjuring up images of all that’s fresh and new. It’s also the perfect time for us to announce our Spring 2018 Release. As with every new release, with this one we bring a handful of great new features and enhancements that our existing customers are sure to appreciate. The improvements now make access to information across the platform easier and more transparent than ever before.

Even more exciting—for both our current and future customers—is our introduction of a bold and forward-looking architecture to the Brightidea product line. With two entirely new products for 2018, we now offer support for any kind of initiative, giving your innovation the firm ground to take root, grow, and thrive.

With all its fresh improvements and expanded new product line, we’re absolutely thrilled with our Spring 2018 Release—and think you’ll be, too.

Brightidea for Innovation Programs is now our easiest and most straightforward product, perfect for small teams on limited budgets. It enables innovation managers to quickly build a culture of innovation through programs that engage employees and tap into their expertise to solve problems or make lasting improvements.

Because these innovation teams have limited resources, it’s critical for them to do more with less. And so without adding costs, the product’s employee engagement capabilities scale to any company size. What’s more, it provides tools and dashboards to measure and depict the ROI of innovation activities enabling managers to justify their budgets and protect their programs.

Brightidea for Innovation Programs makes the innovation process:

• Quick: It works right out of the box so you can jumpstart your program immediately, with no customization required.
• Easy: The intuitive interface includes visual pipeline management, letting you see each idea in the process and manage it with a simple drag-and-drop.
• Budget-friendly: Priced for programs on a modest budget, you can establish processes to effectively drive innovation outcomes.
• Automated: Notifications, rules engines, and communication tools make engaging a large workforce simple.
• Repeatable: Apps streamline the setup, running, and duplication of innovation challenges, events, and discussions.

Through a suite of included innovation apps, Brightidea for Innovation Programs empowers teams with the ability to  engage employees in such activities as company-wide discussions, technical problem solving, improvements to key business areas, and events like hackathons and pitch competitions. Collectively, they help to build a culture of innovation at any scale.

For riskier and more ambitious innovation goals with the highest potential, more and more companies are running funded innovation labs. Unlike programs run as a shared service within their organizations, innovation labs have the budget and authority to launch and develop their own projects autonomously, free from constraints of the core business. What’s more, they employ a lean startup approach, identifying the most promising projects to work on and investing only enough resources to prove the potential for success. Innovation labs are often able to find hidden sources of growth and opportunity, ultimately discovering new frontiers and wielding enormous impact at their companies.

To meet their needs head-on, we introduced Brightidea for Innovation Labs with our Fall 2017 Release. Since then, we’ve further developed the product’s Team Workspace, refining its capabilities enabling labs to achieve three goals critical to their success:

• Streamline processes: A built-in core innovation process enables you to collaborate more efficiently, adopt a lean mindset, and quickly identify the most promising projects.
• Validate efforts: Intuitive tools help to substantiate your projects and showcase their accomplishments to key stakeholders and executives .
• Report on impact: Visual dashboards help to closely track financial returns to the business—in detail and in real time.

Achieving these goals will enable lab managers to tackle the riskiest projects and measurably improve their chances of developing into marketable breakthroughs.

Through a suite of included innovation apps, Brightidea for Innovation Labs enables teams not only to nurture, manage, and track project developments but also to set up large-scale research into customer needs and stay abreast of cutting-edge market trends. By helping to run these activities, the apps help your team to maintain a sharp focus on developing innovations.

As many companies develop innovation strategies, they realize the value of expanding their efforts beyond their borders. Brightidea for Innovation Ecosystems enables you to seamlessly connect to external resources and outside paths to market (link TBD), opening up entire worlds of opportunity and all new possibilities. New for 2018, this product provides the tools to research and connect with sources of innovation well outside your organization, and then tap into the expertise of that external network. What’s more, people in your company can communicate and collaborate freely with outside entities, all while easily protecting intellectual property.

Brightidea for Innovation Ecosystems can help your team:

• Identify opportunities: Whether academic or commercial, it’s easy to connect to new sources of open innovation, and assess them for alignment with corporate strategy.
• Manage centrally: With an easily built and customized open innovation portal, you can connect easily with outside organizations and manages numerous external engagements from one location.
• Communicate freely: Specialized tools enable both internal and external ideas to be captured and submitted safely and securely, protecting IP.

The innovation apps included in Brightidea for Innovation Ecosystems enable a VC business unit to track promising ventures for investment and can also help to guide an internal accelerator or external startups towards growth and success. Facilitating these important activities enables these teams to make the most of their outside networks to more deeply develop their innovations in house.

More and more businesses are recognizing the opportunities that digital transformation promises for their long-term success. The challenge lies in articulating a clear strategy and executing on it. To empower these companies with the right tools to do so, we’ve introduced Brightidea for Organizational Transformation. This product, new for 2018, enables organizational leaders to quickly identify and assess opportunities to transform their business (hyperlink TBD), methodically track their implementation, and ultimately measure their impact.

The enterprise landing page in Brightidea for Organizational Transformation is a central location to submit and view projects for company-wide transformation.

Brightidea for Organizational Transformation can help you transform your business with:

• Thoroughness: Identify and tackle opportunities for transformation from anywhere in your organization. Source ideas from your internal consultants, or uncover hidden opportunities by crowdsourcing from the whole enterprise.
• Efficiency: Rapidly crowdsource ideas for transformation, route them to expert evaluators, and focus quickly on those with the highest potential for success.
• Accountability: Quantify the impact of transformational changes and closely monitor the time and resources used to implement and manage them.

In addition to helping to source and research opportunities for digital transformation, the innovation apps included in Brightidea for Organizational Transformation empower teams to crowdsource suggestions from employees or gather ideas from internal consulting teams, and route them to the right decision-makers to evaluate and take action.

Just as we’ve observed recent trends in the industry to develop our products to better meet market demands, we’ve listened to our customers to improve the Brightidea platform to better meet their needs. A top priority for them has been ease of access to information about their innovation programs. And so, with the Spring 2018 Release we introduce new features and enhancements that boost the transparency of that information, making the platform even more versatile for its users.

Accessing information in the Steps View has never been easier. An End User Steps View now offers multiple views: Stage-only, Steps-only, and Stages+Steps. It also now features submission rollover, stage descriptions and tooltip, filtering and sorting, real-time search, and bookmarks. A new Business Analyst Role feature supports read-only access to the pipeline, navigation from the microsite homepage, and admin assignment from setup of the homepage or pipeline.

The End User Steps View now offers multiple views: Stage-only, Steps-only, and Stages+Steps.

For some time now, customers have asked for the ability to view past idea submissions. We now provide that with the new Idea History feature. It supports a number of functions for the ideas listed, including creation, status change, category change, visibility change, step change, information edit, and action items. The feature offers separate views for administrators and end users, ensuring only the most relevant information is displayed.

The new Idea History tab offers a number of functions for each past idea listed.

Enhancements to the Evaluation Tab make it even more versatile than ever. It now includes support for a single scale and scorecard, as well as a separate views for administrators and evaluators, ensuring only the most relevant information is displayed.

Enhancements to the Evaluation Tab include support for a single scale and scorecard, visibility for evaluators, and visibility on the back end.

Another capability that customers have been asking for is to see a single screen of information on platform administrators. New for 2018 is the Administrators Tab, which lists the current administrators, their roles and areas, and quick links to management areas for each of them.

And finally, one long-awaited feature for both administrators and end-users is the new Admin Navigation Bar, which introduces the ability to navigate from the front end or back end to anywhere else on your microsite. What’s more, the menu bar is responsive to screen size, making it just as useful on smaller mobile devices.

TBD: Bring full circle the spring theme (new growth, new features, new architecture) and close out with something along lines of “Whether you’re just starting an innovation program, running a fully funded innovation lab, or are anywhere in between, Brightidea now offers a product for any type or scope of innovation initiative. It’s all part of our ongoing commitment to build the world’s best platform for corporate innovation teams.

For a visual walk-through of these great new features, check out the Brightidea Spring 2018 Product Release video: