As a leader in the collaborative innovation software space for over a decade, we’ve done a lot of our own collaborative innovation with industry-leading companies like GE, SAP, Motorola Solutions, and Bosch. With today’s breakneck pace of business, these organizations understand the imperative to innovate or be left in the dust.
Along this innovation journey, we’ve worked with many different forms of innovation from new product development to six sigma to R&D. Recently, one model has surfaced as a highly successful approach for getting innovation programs up and running, and delivering consistent innovation outcomes across organizations. It is a form of dedicated innovation group that we call Innovation as a Shared Service – or “ISS”.
ISS is similar to an organizational service like IT and HR because the team is tasked with servicing various stakeholders in diverse business units across the company. The goals for the ISS team are to create a culture of innovation, oversee a corporate innovation center of excellence, and coordinate a network of innovation champions.
Since Brightidea and our customers have experienced first-hand the value of ISS, today we’re excited to announce new capabilities in our Fall 2013 release designed to support and drive ISS team success. Here are some of the highlights:
WebStorm Scheduler:
Auto-pilot for the Innovation Program Manager
ISS teams are nearly always managing concurrent innovation campaigns on behalf of multiple business unit sponsors. At the same time, they are nearly always budget and resource constrained. They need to be energy efficient – to do more with less. Campaign Scheduler provides set-and-forget scheduling of routine activities such as start and stop dates for challenges, ideas, voting, comments, newsletters, and blogs.
Social Collaboration Tools:
Draw your employees into innovation
The beauty of collaborative innovation is that you can tap into your corporate “wisdom of crowds” to develop solutions to challenges, improve processes, or discover the Next Big Thing. For this to be successful you need an interested crowd that is motivated to participate. We’ve introduced Social Collaboration Tools including User Tagging, Notifications, and Action Item Alerts to drive campaign participation. This is all enabled under a new consistent Global Navigation paradigm that that spans our product suite end to end.
Idea Boards:
Showcase your best ideas
Collaborative innovation extends beyond just coming up with ideas. Companies collaborate all the way through the innovation process. It starts with the ability for people to find and evaluate ideas in an easy, engaging way. Idea Boards are a Pinterest-style interface that lets you easily sort, filter and showcase your best ideas. Because after all, you want people to decide on your best ideas, not algorithms.
WebStorm Feedback and Reporting:
Show the true value of your programs
Working with our ISS clients, we know that they need to justify the value of their programs to upper management and stakeholders. Since the outcomes from these programs may not materialize until a much later implementation date, ISS teams need a consistent way to track their effectiveness every step of the way. Webstorm Feedback enables innovation teams to capture and share instant satisfaction feedback from business unit sponsors (the customer) on program status, activities, and results.
Another critical way to monitor campaign effectiveness is through reporting. The Fall 2013 Release delivers new reporting and dashboard capabilities to help innovation managers track their innovation program effectiveness through the entire lifecycle from idea to outcome.
Ongoing Innovation at Brightidea
There are numerous additional new features rolling out with the Fall 2013 release. Fall 2013 is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s on our roadmap to support collaborative innovation and ISS.
These are exciting times for Brightidea. While one of our main competitors has recently thrown in the towel and been acquired due to financial woes, we’re not only expanding our platform and services – we’re accelerating our innovation momentum. Stay Tuned!
