I'm so excited to announce that I've officially joined the Brightidea team as VP, Marketing. Over the course of the last few months, I've had the opportunity to work on a number of projects and have been continuously impressed not only with the caliber and integrity of the team, but also Brightidea's approach to business: Creative, methodical and data-driven. Most recently, Brightidea was named the Leader in the new era of crowdsourced large-scale innovation, by futurist and social business curator for GigaOM, Stowe Boyd.

Having practically created the category for innovation management software, Brightidea is in a unique and enviable position, the team has partnered with top global brands and built killer technology that manages the innovation process end to end. It is rare to find a "start-up" with such an established and impressive client roster, much less one with over 2 million users and that can directly attribute billions of dollars in cost savings and projected new revenue to the use of its technology. To help facilitate that kind of value is truly an amazing opportunity that I'm excited to take on in this new chapter of my career.

For over the last decade, I have worked with Silicon Valley start-ups in digital advertising, mobile and social enterprise, helping these companies bring new products to market and refining their market positioning.  Innovation is ultimately the lifeblood of Silicon Valley, what drives and motivates those that love the start-up lifestyle and mentality: that anything is possible. And innovation beyond the Valley is just as, if not more important. According to a recent Babson College study cited by Brian Solis, "over 40 percent of the companies that were at the top of the Fortune 500 in 2000 were no longer there in 2010."  Pretty clear that innovation is the only path to longevity in today's hyper competitive markets. It's really great to be part of a company that is enabling that kind of innovation through its technology.

This year promises to bring some exciting new developments to Brightidea and I'm very thankful to be part of such an amazing team.

Lively discussions spark creative thoughts and surface new knowledge. That's why they are indispensable for brainstorming and innovation processes.

Idea community managers can leave it to their users to exchange information and thoughts, or actively join the discussion. For instance, they can deliberately create a two-way dialog with their community or chime into conversations to steer them into certain directions.

Now, Brightidea administrators have the option to visually distinguish their comments from other users' contributions. Choosing to post an "Admin Comment" will highlight the message and make it easily recognizable by the community. Admin comments can be pinned above the discussion thread and will also always appear in their correct chronological position inside the comments list.

For example, an admin comment could inform users that a particular idea will be included in an upcoming product release. Pinned to the top of the discussion thread, an admin comment can also effectively shift a discussion by raising a specific question.

To find out more about how admins can use this effective new beta featur to manage their innovation discussions, contact us.

Advancing technologies and cloud-based services have changed our assumptions of where work gets done today. A mobile workforce that collaborates across geographies and time zones can offer clear benefits to enterprises, including cost savings and increased worker productivity. But to fully capitalize on this trend, companies need to make sure that their employees have the right tools to stay connected and get involved from anywhere, at any time.

Brightidea Mobile, our app for the iPhone, allows your innovation community to keep their fingers on your company's innovative pulse whenever they are on the go. Today, we are excited to announce the release of Brightidea Mobile 3.5. With many new features, our app is more socially engaging, intuitive to use, and powerful than ever.

"Our latest Brightidea Mobile release enables users to actively engage in their innovation community in a way they've never done before," says Paul Tran, Head of New Strategic Initiatives at Brightidea. "We've made this app absolutely addictive."

Now, Brightidea Mobile users can, among others, access multiple challenges, see and participate in the activity feed, attach photos to ideas and updates, and stay up-to-date on latest activities with notifications.

"By enabling mobile users to see and act on all innovation activities in their organization, we are truly integrating them into the Innovation Grid!"

Brightidea Mobile is the perfect extension of your corporate innovation community. Whether on the computer screen or smart phone, users can share and collaborate on ideas whenever inspiration strikes.

Why limit collective innovation to the desktop? Help your employees get work done and innovate with Brightidea Mobile! Find out more about our latest app release here and contact us to learn more.

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." (Thomas Edison)

A similar statement could be made about corporate innovation management. The results can be game-changing and make all the difference to a company's future success. But behind the scenes of collective innovation programs, a good deal of thought and work goes into the evaluation and development of ideas into business cases and projects.

At Brightidea, we like to make it easy and efficient for enterprises to reap the full benefits for their ideation initiatives. That's why we have developed the most comprehensive set of tools to manage the back-end of innovation.

These features enable Brightidea admins to keep an overview of all submitted ideas across challenges and to ensure timely and appropriate progression of ideas.

One core function for WebStorm admins is the ability to sort and filter ideas by a broad variety of parameters including scores, submitters, categories, and dates. Especially with large volumes of ideas, being able to quickly slice and dice information is crucial.

Since admins frequently apply the same filters and settings, we have now added the ability to bookmark current views of the ideas grid. This helps save time by letting admins access frequently used idea filters with just one mouse-click.

The WebStorm idea grid bookmark feature captures all applied filters and orders, as well as column selections, positions and widths of the current view. Bookmarks can be named freely and easily deleted. If you are a Brightidea admin, you will love this bookmarking capability. Contact your Brightidea representative to enable this new beta feature in your system today.

Stay tuned for more feature spotlights that will help you reduce perspiration and help you focus on inspiration and results.

As mentioned in our previous blog posts, innovation is a top priority in Latin America. As a recent Washington Post article states "people, not industry, power innovation in Chile"

It's rather timely then that just this week, the Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism in Chile launched the first ever government sponsored open innovation challenge in Chile called Chile Se Escurre. Powered by Brightidea, the online platform invites the public to submit and collaborate on ideas that provide solutions to water issues in Chile, such as reducing consumption, reducing leaks, treatment, and collection. Chile Se Escurre is part of the government's initiative to encourage the average Chilean to become more involved in innovation and entrepreneurship.

With various monetary prizes, including a first place prize of $20,000,00 Chilean pesos (about $42,850 USD), submissions are being judged by their scope, environmental impact, legislative impact, cultural impact, feasibility of implementation, and economic impact.

"Brightidea software proved invaluable to this challenge. Together with strong support from their team of experts we were able to implement specialized look &f eel and functionality requirements quickly," says Guillermo Beuchat, a premier BrightIdea partner in Chile in charge of the strategy, design and implementation of the nation-wide campaign. " We also worked very closely with the government digital media agency and other partners to position the challenge and gain traction quickly in the Chilean community, including a very strong social media presence which integrates seamlessly with the BrightIdea platform." His firm, TRANSFORME Consultores, already has several other BrightIdea implementations running as part of long-term Innovation Management programs for clients like LAN Airlines and PETROQUIM.

Since launching on August 22, the campaign garnered over 40 ideas, hundreds of comments and votes from over 200 users. Some of the most popular ideas look to make use of the Chile's rainfall and suggest ways in which the rain can be collected per household and used for appliances, plumbing, etc. Other ideas are more complex, such a one that proposes an efficient rotational vacuum using centrifugal forces to desalinate seawater.

The challenge is open to all Chilean residents, including foreign residents, until September 25^th, with the winners being announced in November of this year. To learn more click here.

Getting people to participate in an idea campaign or crowdsourcing effort can be a challenge. Especially when they think it will add more work to their already busy day jobs.

As with most new processes and technologies, simplicity is a key driver for adoption. The more intuitive, quick and effective to use, the greater are the chances that people will participate more frequently. Twitter or Google Search with their simple user experience are great examples of this.

At Brightidea, we are devoted to making social innovation management simpler, starting with the process of collecting ideas. That's why we have just added a new quick and easy way to post ideas to a WebStorm.

With the Brightidea Ideas Site Plugin, you can add an Ideas side tab to any of your webpages. A click on the side tab opens a pop-up window that allows users to submit their ideas directly from the webpage they are on.

Users can also attach files, embed videos, and view and vote on the most popular ideas in the WebStorm community. For more information, a link takes them to the WebStorm pages.

Life is complicated enough. Give your innovation community a really quick, simple and intuitive way to make an impact. Get more details on this new feature at http://www.brightidea.com/webstorm-plugin.bix

BLINK: Yeah, that is how fast results will pop up with our new integration with Solr, the open-source search platform from the Apache Lucene Project.  Solr was created by Yonik Seeley at CNET Networks as an in-house project to add search capability for the company website. Now, count Brightidea among the Netflix, Stubhub, and Whitehouse.gov's that use this lightening-fast search platform to provide accurate and relevant results for customers day after day.

With Solr's top of the line cross-platform search capabilities your searches will better navigate the information you care most about.

Features of the new Brightidea search include:

The Solr search engine feature will be in beta for next six months for select Brightidea customers. Make sure to subscribe to our blog to stay up-to-date on all new Brightidea features and applications.

Today we are proud to announce the release of Brightidea's Facebook App designed exclusively for innovation managment.  With this new functionality, businesses can easily tap customers and source ideas through the largest social network online.

The Facebook Page App installs directly into your company's Facebook Page, appearing as an "Ideas" tab at the top of the page and activity such as comments show up in users regular Facebook feed. All data syncs with your WebStorm and back-end decision-making and idea vetting tool, Switchboard.  

Unique functionality of the Brightidea Facebook App includes:

    ·         Submit ideas

    ·         Vote on ideas

    ·         Comment on ideas

    ·         Activity Stream (real-time updates feed)

    ·         Invite a Friend to collaborate on idea

The Facebook App will be in beta for next few months for select Brightidea customers. We are excited to introduce this new extension of our Webstorm platform which takes another step toward being at the very point of creation for ideas.   Our goal remains to always provide the most efficient channel for people to share and develop their ideas.

We will be announcing many more new features in 2011, so subscribe to our blog to stay updated.