Summer is here. As schools let out, vacation plans are finalized, and long days at the beach become the priorities of the day, we wanted to share our latest software release, designed to support you and your innovation goals.
Like a super-sized, complex sand castle, complete with battlements, turrets, and a gatehouse, we see you building-out your Brightidea platforms engaging an ever-broadening set of stakeholders, supporting more varied processes and engaging larger and larger swaths of employees.
To that end we’ve sprinkled some 'everyday magic’ throughout our platform to help you KEEP BUILDING what your organization needs to survive and thrive in this age of constant disruption.
Building upon our existing foundation, we’ve worked hard to refine the innovation tools you rely on daily. We are constantly enhancing and developing based on your feedback, so you can expand your innovation programs and ensure the best ideas win.
Scaling Innovation Throughout Your Organization
As you build upon your foundation and your innovation program scales, we wanted to take a beat to ensure the right features were in place to support your journey. You might be expanding your programs globally, or have pressure to better track business impact; these features are for you:
- Expanded Translation Capabilities: Whether you’re rolling out a challenge across global offices or engaging multilingual teams, Brightidea now offers a seamless in-browser translation service. No heavy integrations, no development delays—just fast, flexible translation support. Contact your Customer Success Manager to request a customized quote or activate a trial. 🌏
- Business Impact Overhaul: We’ve completely revamped the business impact UI and added features making it much more intuitive to use. There’s now a new modern accordion layout making it clear what can be expanded or contracted, with changing input field colors for easy editing. We’ve also updated the “Costs” section to allow switching from free‑text to drop‑down cost categories enabling cleaner, more consistent data and finance‑friendly reports.
- Updated Google Analytics Integration: Admins can now set Google Analytics 4 (GA4) codes for advanced analytics tracking. GA4 offers enhanced measurement capabilities and utilizes machine learning to fill in data gaps. 📈
The Details That Matter…
Just like a sand castle, starting with a foundation before adding the details of brick shapes and spires, we are adding a little bit of everyday magic to refine the foundation of our core platform. Polish makes perfect, which is why we continue to refine the features that our customers interact with daily:
- Reorder Answers on Scorecards: As an admin building a scorecard, you now have the ability to reorder ⬆️⬇️ the answers to questions the same way users can on submission forms.
- Idea Codes in Action Items Progress: We now display idea codes in the table for tracking ideas in Development steps, making it easier to find and manage ideas as they progress. Including idea codes helps streamline the process of tracking and managing action items.
- RTE for Action Item Emails: We’ve enabled Rich Text Editing 3.0 (RTE) for Action Item emails. Rich text editor capabilities now include bolding, bulleting, hyperlinks, and other rich elements. ✉️
- Editable Email Templates: We’ve enabled more editable email templates for Pipeline and Action Item emails, offering flexibility over previously hard-coded communications. Admins can now edit and personalize more of the emails that are sent through the platform including: action item reminders, action item escalation notifications, and advance to next step email notification popups.
- Rules Engine Changelog: Admins can now access a history of changes to rules. Export the rules engine changelog to view a version history of changes to rules or see the last person who changed an item.
Our Hackathon Obsession Continues
We know, we know… we have been more than a little obsessed with Hackathon lately. That’s because we believe hackathons are the best way to give your team the time and space to embrace the possibilities of the AI revolution.
The time and effort we invest now will pay dividends for other areas of our platform. Many of the features we’re building and refining for Hackathon—including our scheduler, viral email alerts, and new dashboards—are immediately relevant and available to our other time-boxed activities like Pitch, Solve & Optimize.
We are also aiming to set a new bar for quality our category for fully-designed, high-quality product experiences based on obsessive customer research and empathy.
Building on our Spring 2025 release of Hackathon 5, our goal is to develop the world’s best solution for organizing internal hackathons. Ten times better than the next best option. Here are a few updates to continue to progress toward that goal:
- Updated Registration: We’ve decoupled registration from onboarding for greater flexibility. The enhanced registration process, controlled by the “Event Live” phase, is now more streamlined and user-friendly to boost participation and great to capture interest while the event is “Coming Soon.”
- Onboarding Improvements: Controlled by the Scheduler “submission” phase and broken apart from the registration flow, updates to the onboarding process guides users effortlessly through initial hackathon setup, enhancing adoption rates. We’ve polished the project image screen, updated the complete flow with refined images, titles, and AI enhancements, as well as added expertise within onboarding.
- Scheduler Updates: We have two wonderful updates in the Hackathon Scheduler, including: 1) streamlining the setup wizard by removing the need to set every date/time for each phase of a hackathon. Admins only need to set the event date and the rest will be autofilled for you as a starting point, allowing for faster event setup, and 2) expanding the schedule screen, making it easier to view and configure your entire Hackathon schedule.
- User-Specific Time Zones: You can now set your system to display dates and times according to your users’ time zone. Once enabled, we’ll automatically detect and update time zones on log in. Always see your correct local times—no confusion, no conversions. This is extremely important when planning remote hackathons with phases that need to start and stop on participant timezones. 🕒 (CER17356)
No release is complete without squashing our bug backlog! With that, we’ve taken input by customers and colleagues alike to resolve over 100 bugs since the previous release. Beyond the features and improvements listed above, we’ve also sprinkled a little every day magic across the core platform with additional maintenance and stability improvements which can be tracked on our product release notes.
Architect Your Future
Technology is evolving at a breathtaking pace. These shifting sands create an endless stream of challenges and opportunities for Innovation Teams.
Rest assured, the Brightidea Team is hard at work, to deliver you the most-advanced capabilities available. So you can continue to architect the innovation platform of your dreams.
We’ve also got a boatload of upgrades coming for the Innovation Cloud 5 release. We hope you get a chance to; relax, recharge and refocus this Summer. KEEP BUILDING! and we’ll see you in the Fall. 🏰
