Bridging the gap from idea to funded business proposal
Brightidea has always been focused on empowering innovation activities through crowdsourcing ideas, solving problems, executing hackathons and pitch events, collecting ideas across the company all while creating a safe space for feedback and innovation to thrive. While all of these activities are important on their own, they still leave a gap between the idea and truly developing proposals that can bring to market opportunities that have the ability to change the trajectory of a company. Over the last few years we set out to discover the best possible way to develop big ideas into real world innovations, and in doing so, how we could build a software solution that would accomplish the same objective.
In our search we examined many different approaches to dealing with big ideas, but one approach seemed to be far more effective than the rest. Amazon, arguably one of the world’s most innovative companies, found a systematic way to internally and organically innovate that transformed their business from a successful online bookstore to one of the world’s most dominant tech companies.
At Amazon they refer to this methodology as Working Backwards, and it first starts with the customer in mind by writing a future looking press release and a set of FAQs about the hypothetical product or service. From there they rely on a collaborative longform narrative approach to develop their big ideas into well thought out business proposals that consider all of the information needed to make a strategic business investment and bring products to market like; AWS, Alexa, Kindle, Fire, Prime and more.
Brightidea Memo – Turn big ideas into big profits
Today, Brightidea is excited to announce the release of Brightidea Memo, the world’s first purpose-built software solution designed to harness the power of longform narrative memo writing. We have often heard from our customers that one of their biggest challenges is dealing with disruptive and game changing innovation. Big ideas by their nature are disruptive to normal business processes, and although almost all of our customers have game changing ideas being submitted to their innovation programs, very few of those opportunities make it into the company’s strategic roadmap for various reasons.
Brightidea Memo is an end-to-end solution that enables teams to take all of the ideas worthy for consideration, then develop them via longform narrative for evaluation, refinement, and investment using the same methodology that empowered Amazon to make the most impactful bets.
Let’s take a look at how Brightidea Memo is going to turn your team’s big ideas into big profits.
Memo Team Sites
Everything Memo related all in one place!
Brightidea Memo houses everything you need with regards to your Memo Program in your Memo Team Site. For Brightidea users, this will be very familiar territory and most of the experience will be similar to what you know and love from Brightidea.
Memo Team Site features:
- Unlimited Memo users
- Unlimited Memo creation
- Unlimited Memo reviewers and contributors
- Unlimited Memo administrators
- Unlimited Memo Batches
- Memo Userhome
- Memo micro (Team) site
- Brightidea Whiteboards
Writing and reviewing Memos is just the beginning… Now it’s time to execute! Keep the whole program together in your Memo Team Site. It’s a dedicated space for collaboration where you can link everything related to your memo program, post all updates and collaborate with your team, stay on track and execute effortlessly.
Ready to set up your Memo Team Site? Just reach out to your Customer Success Manager, or you can always start a 30 day free trial on your own.
Multiplayer document creation
Assemble your dream team and start writing.
All the features of your favorite document creation apps, but with the power of Brightidea collaboration features. Collaborate and craft your memos with the help of your best and brightest teammates and SMEs. Assign tasks to other contributors and quickly pick up where you left off.
Document creator features:
- Track collaborator contributions at the document edit level
- See who’s contributions moved the needle with X-Ray
- Real-time multiplayer document creation
- Commenting capabilities
- Assign action items for reviews and editorial
- Spelling and grammar check
Check out our knowledge base article to learn everything there is to know about our collaborative document editor.
AI Writing Assistant
Use our AI Writing Assistant to quickly generate your press release and FAQs.
The first step in Working Backwards is to start with a future press release of what your product or service would look like on launch day. This keeps customers top of mind and aligns value to what customers want.
After the press release follows internal and external FAQs to help flesh out your ideas. But writing a press release can be daunting, especially if you have never done it. With the power of our AI Writing Assistant, your users can quickly craft a press release and FAQs from just an idea description.
AI Writing features:
- Generate content in less than a second
- Leverage decades of innovation knowledge
- Applied contextuality from web based results
- Natural language processing automatically applied
- Ask questions and get responses from the writing assistant
- Let the writing assistant pick up where you left off and continue writing
With the built in AI Writing Assistant your team can eliminate writer’s block and get your memos moving.
Learn more about how to use the AI Writing Assistant in our knowledge base article.
Best-in-class templates
Get started quickly with templates from the world’s most innovative companies.
Never created a strategic memo before? No problem, we have some of the best-in-class templates from companies like Amazon, Stripe and LinkedIn to help get you started quickly.
Templates included:
- Press Release
- Executive summary
- Internal FAQ
- External FAQ
Want more templates? Submit your template ideas to Customer IdeaSpace and we will get them into our backlog.
Memo reviews
A critical component of a Memo Program is review and feedback. Memos often require multiple rounds of review and feedback before they are ready for approval and funding. At Amazon, reviews are conducted in ‘silent meetings’ where reviewers sit down and read memos in silence before providing feedback to the authors.
With Brightidea Memo you can conduct Amazon like ‘silent reviews’ from anywhere, which greatly expands the amount and diversity of feedback that the authors can obtain. You can assign review action items on the fly or as a part of your batch process so that you collect feedback whenever the author or Memo Program owner needs it.
Review features:
- Request reviews on the fly
- Two way commenting between reviewers and authors
- Assign reviews as a formal action item in your Batch workflow
- Aggregate feedback and scoring
- Historical scoring to track improvement
- Automation to progress memos that cross your review scoring thresholds
Expand the reach and audience from in the room silent meetings to anytime, anywhere feedback sessions with Brightidea Memo.
Learn how to request a review of your memo on the fly in our knowledge base article.
Structured workflows for Memo Batches
Manage your end-to-end Memo Program with automated workflows for Memo Batches.
Staying organized is critical to the success of your Memo Program. With Brightidea you can leverage automated workflows to monitor and progress your memos along. Your Memo Team Site comes with a preconfigured workflow based upon best practices for running a Memo Program. Feel free to customize our out of the box workflow to meet your team’s process by adding fully configurable steps and stages or removing things that are not necessary.
Workflow features:
- Unlimited Memo Batch setup
- Best-in-class memo workflow template
- Fully configurable steps and stages
- Rules Engine automation
- Assign action items
- Assign reviewers
- Webhooks and integrations
The Memo Workflow comes with all the features you know and love from pipelines, but if you want to learn more you can check out our knowledge base article.
Using Smart Matrix to help score your memos
Balancing qualitative and quantitative feedback is key in understanding business priorities. Don’t forget to use the Brightidea Whiteboard tool to help. From list view, steps, or top ideas, users can right-click and send the memos directly into the Whiteboard.
Use the Smart Matrix feature to further evaluate and stack rank memos. These scores will be tracked and showcased directly in Top Ideas to help consider which Memo should be progressed within your planning cycle.
Learn all about using Smart Matrix to score memos in our knowledge base article.
Top Ideas to surface the next, best memo
The Top Ideas interface allows admins to surface the best ideas at-a-glance via several different criteria such as; top rated from evaluations, most popular, most active, smart matrix scoring, and even those with the most merit.
This feature cuts through the noise allowing you more time to work on the ideas that will have the most impact and let the best ideas win and with this new release, we have ensured you will see the most critical information available at a glance with our new, enhanced card view.
When using the Top Ideas interface, users can apply filters and sort preferences to help showcase or identify gaps, opportunities, and next steps. These filters can now be shared with other user’s in the system, to ensure teams are working through the same prioritized list or items that may be ready for review.
Learn all about Top Ideas in our knowledge base article.
Measure impact and track KPIs
Brightidea Memo comes loaded with robust reporting and analytics dashboards to track engagement, business impact, ROI and much more. Leave the guesswork out of your Memo Program. Know which memos and contributors are making the biggest impact at a glance and report on the success of your program to executives.
Dashboards include:
- Employee Engagement
- Heat Maps to track regional engagement
- Business Impact Tracking
- Projected Impact v. Actual Auditing
Showcasing the impact of your Memo Program should be a breeze once you’re up and running.
To learn about all of our Dashboard and reporting features, check out the knowledge base article.
Use the documents tools that you’re comfortable with
We’ve also built a Brightidea browser extension so you can request and complete reviews within the document, syncing live with the Brightidea system Easily create a document with your preferred document editor directly in Brightidea for the whole team to locate and access, while still linking out to the native app. Use the browser extension to write memos, complete reviews, track progress, comment, collaborate and keep the data in sync with your Memo Team Site, regardless of where you prefer to work.
You can download the browser extension for Chrome here.
Read more about how to set up our browser extension for Google Drive and OneDrive in our knowledge base article.
Experienced practitioners to support you
Starting from zero can be scary… but we have you covered. Our team of consultants can get your Memo Program up and running fast! With decades of combined experience, we are uniquely equipped to train you and your stakeholders.
We offer a variety of onboarding and consulting services to help your team learn how to not only write memos and conduct silent meetings, but also how to manage your end-to-end Memo Program. For those more experienced practitioners, we also offer advanced strategic planning workshops focused on maturing your Memo Program.
Try Memo today for free
Longform memo writing is the way Amazon broke out of being an online bookstore and was able to consistently innovate. At Brightidea, we believe that longform memo writing is the key to developing big ideas that defy business as usual processes and need dedicated resources to bring to market. That’s why we developed Brightidea Memo to facilitate a memo writing program that will bridge the gap between ideas and fully fundable business proposals ready for launch and scale.
Memo is designed to be an end-to-end solution that helps teams launch a Memo Program who have never done it before, as well as level up the efforts of existing Memo Programs by bringing all of the Memo Program activities into one centralized location.
Give Brightidea Memo a try today for free, and take advantage of our introductory pricing of $99/team site/mo. before it’s gone!
Until next time,
Stay bright
