Dynamic navigation has quickly become a best practice for any kinds of websites. It enables site owners to configure navigation options, so that site users can find what they are looking for faster. For a positive user experience, dynamic navigation is therefore a critical tool.

While most innovation management applications only provide limited navigation options and require extra custom work to make any changes, Brightidea offers an easy-to-use, built-in dynamic navigation function.

Through the setup menu, admins can optimize the navigation menus of their Brightidea system, both on Enterprise-level and for individual campaigns. Navigation items and trails can be added, edited, arranged and removed in a very intuitive way.

This gives innovation program managers the flexibility to better guide their users through the ideation and collaboration process, align the look and feel of their Brightidea system with the corporate websites and give better visibility to the most important content.

Another great benefit of this feature is the ability to let end-users quickly move from the Brightidea navigation bar to other integrated applications, like SharePoint, or selected external webpages.

For more information about the one-of-a-kind flexibility and functionality Brightidea's products offer, schedule a demo. We look forward to talking with you!

Brightidea customers frequently let us know that they love the intuitiveness of our products. This makes us happy and we continue to focus on building software that makes our users as efficient and effective as possible at doing their jobs.

Rather than black-box algorithms to move ideas to the next stage, we have built a transparent, comprehensive, and flexible set of backend tools specifically for admins.

Brightidea's admin interfaces are designed to efficiently manage and monitor large amounts of data and users across the entire innovation process. They provide clear overviews with sorting, filtering and bookmarking capabilities. Batches of ideas, proposals, or projects can be easily dropped into collections and further processed using intuitive Action menus.

Want to merge or link multiple ideas? Need to add the same tags to multiple ideas? Assign scorecards? Move them into an integrated PPM application? These and more activities can be performed for any number of selected ideas at a time via the Action menu.

To see how Brightidea's admin features can help you manage innovation more efficiently, contact us to schedule a demo.

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.

Continuous communication with your innovation community is important. Frequent messages including challenge updates, user recognition, tips and how-tos keep the ball rolling and encourage participation. Did you know that with Brightidea you can send html-formatted emails from within the WebStorm system?

Brightidea offers a built-in Newsletter feature for admins. Intuitive to use, it enables admins to send professionally formatted communication to users and user groups.

All emails (sent or drafts) are stored for tracking and future reference. This makes it easy for admins to see which messages they sent, when and to whom.

 So whether you get all creative and explore different fonts, colors, image settings and html coding, or you choose a plain text style email to reach out to your innovators, the Brightidea Newsletter function keeps all messages in one place.

To learn more about this productivity feature, please speak to your Brightidea representative. And if you are curious to dive deeper into Brightidea's rich functionality, contact us to schedule a demo.

Top innovative companies fund business proposals, not ideas. That's why it makes sense to develop ideas further before making decisions on which ideas to move forward with. Brightidea's Switchboard combines proposal development and evaluation into a flexible, systemic workflow, geared at determining the best innovations for your company.

We have talked about why and how to build business cases with Switchboard. The next step is selecting which ones to invest in.

Better Business Decisions Made Faster

In collective ideation initiatives, the quality and depth of submitted ideas usually varies significantly. By developing submissions into business cases it is possible to bring ideas onto a similar level of maturity and provide a more solid basis for further assessment. Evaluators can now compare "apples to apples" and thus deliver more accurate evaluations with less effort.

It also accelerates the evaluation process, since a significant amount of work in preparation for the evaluation has already happened. Especially if senior executives are involved in the decision making process, efficiency is critical for their continued support.

Let's look at how Switchboard enables companies to manage and streamline the evaluation process.

Evaluating Innovation with Multi-Round Scorecarding

To evaluate proposals against each other, they can be easily grouped into "Collections". These collections can then be assigned evaluation scorecards. A scorecard is a list of questions specifically put together to determine the business value of proposals in a collection. Switchboard allows for flexible configuration of scorecards with any type of responses, like free text, multiple choice or radio buttons. Answers are given predefined scores that automatically roll up to a total value for each proposal.

Scorecards can be routed to the appropriate subject-matter experts and decision makers to request their feedback. Teams who are assigned to evaluate a round of proposals can see each business case side-by-side with the scorecard, and are given a space for evaluator-exclusive discussion.

At the end of an evaluation round, proposals can be compared by their overall scores. Taking a closer look at the answers to single questions helps determine where disagreements lie across evaluators. These can then be addressed in meetings, making team discussions more productive.

In larger or more complex initiatives, multiple rounds of evaluations can be set up in order to funnel down on the final proposals.

Monitoring and Managing the Evaluation Process

The fuller your innovation pipeline, the easier it is to lose track of the status of each proposal and outstanding action items. Luckily Switchboard offers tools and visual indicators that make it easy to keep an overview. Through drag and drop and intuitive menu options, proposals can smoothly be moved forward in the evaluation process, be incubated or archived. Nothing ever gets lost, yet the best proposals crystallize clearly and can be turned into projects for execution.

From raw ideas to ready-to-implement business cases, Switchboard streamlines the process and provides easy access to all relevant related information for project managers and decision makers.

Ready to step up your corporate innovation management process? Contact us to find out how Brightidea's Switchboard can help you find the right next step for every idea.

How do you grow ideas? It usually starts with getting interested people together and having them collaborate.

Activity feeds are a smart and effective way to reach out to potentially interested and entice them to join the discussion. In Brightidea's Innovation Suite, we have equipped the built-in Activity Feed with rich features that keep the community engaged and the discussion focused.

Updates on new ideas, comments, votes, status changes, and more with direct links to the ideas spark new thoughts from other users and propel the ideation process forward. Each activity is tied to a user profile which facilitates collaboration and surfaces potential new subject-matter experts.

A microblogging function allows users to post short messages and share images or videos directly inside the feed. The community can give praise ('High-Five!') and comment on micro-blogs. This not only adds more life to the conversation, it also allows the community to keep itself focused by expressing support for valid contributions and steering deviating posts back on track. And for those on the go, all these features are also available through Brightidea's iPhone app.

Brightidea's activity feed is not just a thread of water cooler conversations, it is a key feature to grow and maintain an active social innovation community. Time to get social and see ideas grow!

Let us know, if you want to take a closer look at our Activity Feed and the other social features that make our innovation software so engaging.

In the first post in our Power of Proposal series, we highlighted some of the benefits of developing ideas into business cases before deciding which ideas to move forward with.

Until recently, effective tools to support this crucial part of the innovation lifecycle were missing. That's why Brightidea created Switchboard 2.0. A part of our social innovation suite, we designed Switchboard as a sophisticated engine for idea development and evaluation. Now, let's take a look at the overall functionality and some key features of Switchboard Proposals.

Social Meets Goal-Oriented Flexibility with Switchboard

To successfully go from a long list of ideas to just a few ready-to-invest-in business cases, the process – and the tools enabling it – require three key attributes:

• Social: Collaboration of the right subject-matter experts is necessary to determine the true value of an idea and maximize it early on.
• Focused: A goal-oriented, structured process makes sure that proposal teams stay geared toward the overall objectives and evaluations are based on consistent parameters.
• Flexible: To not stifle productive creativity and allow for all kinds of innovations, workflows and features need to offer flexibility.

So, here are a few selected Proposal features that were designed with these qualities in mind.

Proposal Templates

One size doesn't fit all in innovation processes. That's why Switchboard administrators can easily create and maintain proposal templates. These templates give business case teams a framework by asking specific questions and structuring the proposal. For example, if limited resources are a major concern, the proposal template can specifically request information on the type and amount of resources needed to bring an idea to life.

Transitioning ideas from WebStorm into proposals in Switchboard is a quick, easy and smooth process. Once a proposal is created, proposal team members can be invited to build the business case in a private environment.

Proposal Team Collaboration

Proposals offer an exclusive space for the assigned team. Members can add content, make edits, attach supporting files and keep track of action items and much more. A discussion thread allows for private communication between the team members. With all information and activities in one place, collaboration becomes focused and effective.

Proposal Development Tracking

When team members add or edit information, Switchboard automatically creates new versions and allows for easy tracking of all actions. The history of versions offers full transparency. No more "My dog ate the business case".

With direct links to related ideas, evaluation details and results, and the projects that derived from this business case, tracking functions span beyond Switchboard across the whole innovation pipeline.

From Proposal Development to Evaluation

Stay tuned for our next Power of Proposal blog post in which we'll describe Switchboard's features to evaluate proposals through multi-round scorecarding.

In the meantime, don't hesitate to contact us for a live demo of Switchboard.

“How to drive innovation” continues to be a hot topic by many of Brightidea's customers. Different innovation models and processes are discussed, but a recurring theme is how to get the right people involved and motivated.

Luckily there are many ways to engage a community. Whether or not they will admit it, people like to be recognized and rewarded for the things they do. People are also competitive. As such, a great way to motivate people is to award points based on the activities they perform. More activity leads to more points. More relevant activities result in higher awards. Sounds simple, but coupled with a “Leaderboard” that displays the top scoring users it really works. At Brightidea, we have successfully worked with many companies that have leveraged WebStorm’s scoring features.

Since incentive structures vary, flexibility is a key attribute for a scoring system. With WebStorm, administrators can easily assign different scores to particular user actions. For example, users can be awarded points for posting an idea or voting or commenting on others’ ideas. They can win points when other users promote their idea, or lose points when others demote the user’s submission. This helps drive user’s behavior in strategically important directions.

The Leaderboard gives top contributors visibility and recognition. People do care who’s leading the score. And they will take action to climb up the ranking.

For innovation managers, scoring systems also help surface idea champions and subject matter experts. Often, it’s not the loudest voices that have the best ideas or in-depth knowledge. WebStorm scores can help identify the most active users around a challenge or topic, while taking the quality of the users’ contributions into account.

To dive deeper into the topic of effective rewards and recognition for innovation, read this article by Brightidea’s resident innovation expert, James Pasmantier.