SAP Revamps Largest Customer Co-Creation Portal in History

As one of the largest software companies in the world, SAP is in constant demand of the best ideas. Transparency, scalability, and access to feedback are all critical to continually re-envisioning products to meet and exceed customer demands. For the past few years SAP’s has used Idea Place as its main channel to collect customer feedback on SAP products and services. When SAP decided that a program revamp was in order, it decided the emphasis of the new Idea Place should be on customer co-creation and open innovation, and with the technical scalability and increased social functionality that will further entrench the voice of the customer into the product lifecycle. Powered by Brightidea software, this next generation co-creation platform gives SAP the ability to scale its efforts to continually innovate by providing customers a seamless channel to inform the product roadmap.

As the largest open innovation platform of its kind, Idea Place is an enterprise-wide system that hosts over 100 idea sessions (or “WebStorms"™ in Brightidea terms). Each idea session is focused around a specific SAP product or service, operating independently with its program owner, leveraging its own automated workflow processes, categories and navigation. Owners are typically an SAP Product Manager in charge of gaining participation and engagement for their own product.

Currently scoped around existing SAP products and services, the vision for the program extends well beyond incremental product feedback and enhancements, according to Kuhan Milroy, Director of Social Business Innovation at SAP.

“The vision of Idea Place is to provide disruptive innovation through breakthrough ideas, reaching new audiences as well as connecting audiences that SAP has traditionally not connected before,” says Milroy.

Providing transparency is something that Idea Place already does and will continue to do, and the capabilities and functionality provided by Brightidea software make that much easier. Some notables are:

• Anyone who wants to can visit and view Idea Place activity. Those who want to get involved and participate can gain access to submit and collaborate by registering through SAP’s community site SCN.
• Each campaign includes Social activity feeds and notifications that allow users to follow and collaborate on topics they care most about and connect easily with others.
• In-depth metrics and analytics on everything from idea submissions, comments, votes, evaluation statuses, to implemented enhancements are available both on an individual campaign as well as enterprise level.
• Planned integrations with product development and issue tracking tools like Jira help provide a seamless pathway to route ideas back into the product development lifecycle.

SAP realizes that in order to continually meet and exceed customer demands they simply cannot afford to ignore their customers’ feedback. Providing a continual, fully integrated channel to tap customer ideas on existing and future products will help SAP stay ahead of market demands and the competition in the years ahead!

Check out SAP’s revamped Idea Place today here. Or you can also read the full details of the announcement, here.