Since our Spring release shipped Hackathon 6 in March, our product and engineering team has been heads down — not just shipping features, but laying the groundwork for something bigger.
This Summer release pulls that work together into a coordinated drop across four areas: continued investment in our Hackathon solution, a meaningful expansion of Department Idea Box, foundational platform upgrades, and the next chapter of our AI story. Not bolted-on AI. Core infrastructure — the kind that makes the whole platform smarter, and sets up, spoilers, an AI-centric Fall release.
AI: State-of-the-art infra upgrades mean you get exactly what you want, the moment you want it.
AI is transforming industries at the speed of light. We took a step back and asked ourselves: What do customers need? What can we build that will not be irrelevant in the next few months? Another chatbot? Better document and image generation? No, these are just bolt-on capabilities. AI’s impact is more structural than that. Our team responded by opening our API for full ‘headless’ access. Anything you can do through the browser, you can now do via the API. We also added native connectors that connect to your own private AI models. Lastly, we are pulling back the curtain on how we’ve been building custom vibe widgets within the platform for the past few months. This opens the door to make the platform do whatever you need it to do.
Want to enable it? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager. We’re prioritizing onboarding for customers who already have an active AI footprint internally.
- Brightidea MCP Server. The Brightidea MCP Server, lets you interact with your system’s instance directly through the AI agent of your choice. Built on the Model Context Protocol, the MCP server connects to Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, AWS Bedrock, and any other MCP-compatible agent — so your team can surface ideas, summarize submissions, query pipeline status, or pull engagement data conversationally. Admins can interact with configuration; end users can interact with ideas. Contact your Customer Success Manager to enable it.
- Bring Your Own Model. Every enterprise has a different AI setup. Some are running models through Azure OpenAI or AWS Bedrock. Some call model APIs directly. Some run models entirely behind their own firewall. Brightidea now connects to all of them. Bring your endpoint and your credentials — we route Brightidea’s AI workflows through whatever model you already use, with no changes to your data residency, governance, or cost structure.
- AI-Powered Vibe Widgets. Our HTML widget has quietly become one of the most powerful surfaces in the platform. Customers can now use AI tools — Claude, ChatGPT, or any vibe-coding workflow of their choice — to generate fully custom, data-driven widgets and inject the resulting HTML directly into their Brightidea sites. Build a custom leaderboard, a department-specific submission tracker, a portfolio visualization, or whatever your innovation program needs — without waiting on a product release. Your AI tool writes it; your HTML widget runs it. Vibe away.
Department Idea Box: now even more self-contained for team innovation
Department Idea Box is one of the most strategically important parts of our platform — it’s how large enterprises empower individual departments and business units to run their own innovation programs without competing for the central platform’s attention. This release is a substantial investment in making Department Idea Box feel truly self-contained: every department gets the tools to run its own program without interfering with anyone else’s on the platform.
- Dynamic idea and user lists. Idea List and User List are now dynamic at the department level — so each department sees the right ideas and the right people for their context, without manual configuration overhead.
- Additional sub-pipelines. Departments can now add additional sub-pipelines, supporting more sophisticated workflows for departments that have outgrown the templated three pipeline approach and linear flow.
- Setup wizard flows and logic. We’ve reworked the setup wizard with smarter flows and decision logic, making it faster for admins to spin up a new department program and easier to get the configuration right the first time.
- Left rail updates. Navigation refinements bring the product in line with the rest of the platform — consistent admin and participant views, cleaner left rail behavior.
Together, these updates make Department Idea Box the right answer for any large organization that wants federated, departmental innovation programs running in parallel under one platform roof.
Hackathon: continued momentum
Hackathon 6 launched in March with the most ambitious update to our hackathon solution to date. As any team that’s shipped a major release knows, the work doesn’t end on launch day — it continues through the dozens of refinements that turn a great release into a great product. This Summer, we’re continuing to invest in the Hackathon experience for both admins and participants.
- Global event scheduler. Auto launch your event in every participant’s local time. One program, one setup, every time zone.
- Hackathon-only navigation. For customers running a Hackathon, we’ve simplified the experience by introducing a collapsible left rail menu, allowing you to focus on the content that matters – as well as permission-based views for admins or participants.
- Less distractions, more action. We moved search directly into the left rail and removed the broader enterprise navigation when you’re in a Hackathon Team Site. Less clutter, faster access, fewer clicks for the people running events.
- Participant search experience. We’ve updated the participant and record search experience to pull the data directly into your team site. Review information, see the actions to take, and drive your Hackathon to success.
Platformwide enhancements and upgrades
Many of the most-requested updates this quarter come straight from customer ideas submitted. These aren’t headline features — they’re the daily-use refinements and behind-the-scenes upgrades that make a real difference for admins running large programs.
- Desktop and mobile, consistency. Based on direct feedback from our Solutions Engineering team and customers, we’re bringing the most-used desktop widgets into the mobile app to close the gap: Rich Text / HTML 3.0 and the Phase Widget (including the Hackathon-specific version). We also updated our support for custom CSS for better control and to align with your pre-configured branding. Whether your team is at their desk or in the field, the experience feels like one product — not two.
- Project Room Home — for Stage Gate and portfolio modeling. Our new Project Room template creates a true participant- and team-focused hub for any solution that benefits from a coordinated workspace — StageGate, Innovation Process, Hackathon, or any portfolio review motion. This is a meaningful upgrade for customers running stage-gate workflows and portfolio review cadences, giving project teams a single landing page that brings the right context together. Pair it with the new Audit Log (below) for a full picture of who did what, when.
- Project Room Audit Log. Project Rooms now have a long-requested audit trail — users can see who added, edited, or deleted items in a Project Room, visible in the room itself and exportable for compliance and governance reviews.
- Discretionary Points at the site level. Admins can configure discretionary points at the site level, giving program leaders more flexibility in how they recognize contribution and reward participation. Enabled via toggle: Allow Site Admin to assign discretionary points.
- Action Items: category-driven reassignment. When a category is changed on an idea and the step is using category-based assignment, open action items will now automatically reassign to the correct owner. No more orphaned tasks when categories shift mid-flight.
- Accessibility: T&C page improvements. We’re updating the Terms & Conditions page to be screen-reader friendly and refreshing labels on the import/settings page. A small change with big implications for our enterprise customers with accessibility requirements.
- Power BI Connector v4.4: The latest version of the Brightidea Power BI Connector is now available on the download page. This update adds username and password authentication support and improves data loading resilience — making it more reliable across a wider range of enterprise environments.
- Azure DevOps Integration: Brightidea now integrates with Azure DevOps, Microsoft’s enterprise platform for project tracking and development workflows. For teams already running Azure DevOps alongside their innovation programs, this connection keeps ideas and execution in sync — without the manual handoff. Learn more about Azure DevOps.
Looking ahead
Hackathon polish, Department Idea Box maturity, platform modernization, and continued beats of our AI story. Each thread is meaningful in its own right; together, they set up a Fall release that goes far beyond incremental.
From the start, our goal wasn’t to add AI because everyone else was doing it — it was to add it in ways that actually matter to how our customers run innovation. We’re already seeing customers do remarkable things with the MCP Server and Vibe Widgets, and that’s just the beginning. We’ll keep evolving Idea Box, Hackathon, and the platform to make sure Brightidea remains the best product in the world for managing corporate innovation.
We’ll have more to share soon. Until then: enable the MCP, take our AI Maturity Survey, and explore what’s new.
