This post is part of the Innovation Management Practitioners Blog series.

United States may continue to be a dominant player adding to the global manufacturing output, but by smaller margins than in the past. The decline of US manufacturing compared with the rest of the world showcases the dominance of emerging economies such as China that are doubling total output (see stats here and here). The gap could become even larger as emerging market manufacturers around the world have demonstrated success through government support and focus on advanced manufacturing. In June 2011, the United States President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released their Report to the President on Ensuring American Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing, which delineates the issues with the current state of manufacturing in the U.S. in comparison and that, “as U.S. leadership in manufacturing declines, other nations are investing heavily in advancing their manufacturing leadership, innovation systems, and R&D. As hopes to increase jobs and support the advancement of a robust manufacturing continue, private companies are exploring how innovation can spur growth, cost-savings, and efficiency through initiatives designed specifically to fuel innovation.

This is Part Two in the series discussing Brightidea's Limitless innovation campaign looking to Brightidea employees for the latest technology and social application ideas. In the first post, we sat down to speak with VP of Product, Jason Hardy-Smith. This time we bring you Paul Tran, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Brightidea, who delves into the experiences of using Brightidea software and the methods utilized to achieve dynamic participation at all levels of the company.

Paul brings years of expertise helping customers use Brightidea software to deliver continuous results. However, using it for an internal campaign at Brightidea has surfaced new insights for Paul such as, "it allows us to firsthand experience what it's like for customers to use our software and that allows us to make the user experience better by actually putting it through our own internal processes." Using Brightidea internally makes it possible to take advantage of countless features and workflows. A few utilized include automated point-scoring for participation and campaign leaderboards, as well as advanced concept clustering to identify themes to inform proposal collaboration and scorecarding needed for proper decision-making.

Just like most campaigns, challenges and key insights emerge, such as learning how to formulate and present a concept clearly. Paul emphasizes the importance of how an idea is communicated because "not everybody knows how to pitch, not everybody knows how to communicate their idea very well." Through this campaign Brightidea employees gain knowledge on how to effectively present an interesting idea so that the idea itself is exciting with illustrations, clear presentations, pictures, and more.

Paul also helps Jason moderate the campaign and facilitate continuous communication internally. By actively engaging the community through spurring discussions around concept submissions via comments, as well as sending company-wide emails and directly speaking with employees around the office. "We made a formal announcement from the CEO in a town hall, subsequently we've pinned up metrics. For example I print out what the current stats are and put them on the office walls so when people walk down the halls they can see how many ideas have been submitted today, what the most recent ones are, and what the most popular are."

Paul believes that the ownership of the Limitless campaign at a VP level helps drive the success of the entire campaign. "What's really inspired the employees on Limitless versus different campaigns is that there's a true owner," says Paul. "No doubt we've run countless employee-facing campaigns in the past. It is not that nobody's listening to them, and ideas aren't being implemented, but partially these campaigns act as a system of record too. With Limitless, we have an owner at a department level driving it who is extracting enormous value from the collaboration with a vested interest in the findings and insights being surfaced." Giving employees from every area of the business one space for collaboration around new technology, as Paul passionately notes is "extremely valuable".

Be sure to follow Paul on Twitter at @paultran888.

Brightidea is a company built on the principles of making innovation practical. It's not surprising, then, that we use our own software as a system of record for internal communications on everything from process improvements to customer enhancement requests via our public IdeaSpace. Targeted campaigns are also common, from the Marketing Department seeking ideas for our innovation newsletter to our most recent annual internal campaign called Limitless, inspired by the feature film, looking for the latest breakthrough ideas for Brightidea technology.

We recently chatted with Jason Hardy-Smith, Vice President of Product Management at Brightidea, about spearheading Limitless. The reason for the annual campaign, "we weren't sure we had the right ideas and we thought that if we opened it up to the company we'd get a greater variety of ideas from different perspectives." The entire process of tapping the wealth of knowledge and expertise spread across the organization is proving to have a powerful impact on the Product team's work and vision for the future. "I think it's quite enlightening. The different perspectives that people bring to the table are what is going to make our solution really unique. I'm really proud of it. I'm really proud that across the country everybody has taken the time to participate."

And people did participate. In the first few days 80% of the company logged-in to the campaign, and there has since been 100% login rate. The quality of participation and the collaboration post-submission has been truly impressive. "People aren't just sitting there for 10 minutes and thinking about an idea, they're actually hours and days putting together complex diagrams, long explanations and doing research on technologies to bring things to be really well thought out and polished," says Jason.

Limitless is also representative of the Brightidea philosophy and "this company belongs to everybody that works in it," said Jason, meaning that employees are encouraged to be active contributors in deciding what the roadmap for the company should be. He also added, "in running a company in that way I think you get more buy-in and collaboration and you have happier employees, it's just generally a better place to work."

When asked what it was like using Brightidea's own software, Jason responded that it's "humbling in a way because you think you know everything about your product and you think you know what's best for it all the time, but when you're actually using your product in a real-life scenario you realize that you're missing something and you come up with things that you never would have imagined would be in the product."

Overall, as a VP of Product, sourcing ideas and developing concepts that truly are unique and make a difference is paying off as Jason signs off saying, "I don't think there's another software that meet the product manager's needs as much as this does."

You can follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonHardySmith

Here at Brightidea we are constantly working to provide the best experience for our customers to innovate more efficiently.

We understand that hiccups happen and support issues emerge. With our Brightidea Support Portal, administrators have access to an unparalleled on-demand resource for interactive support along with numerous tips, best practice docs, and video tutorials. We continually provide customers with the most up-to-date knowledge and support that facilitates innovation success. Over the years, the Brightidea Support Portal has quickly and effectively handled a range of customer support tickets with a 96% customer satisfaction rate.

Brightidea serves Fortune 2000 innovation leaders that offer a wealth of knowledge and experience. Within the Support Portal, the ability to facilitate peer-to-peer discussion is easy. The Brightidea Innovation Community is a forum where administrators can ask questions, post comments, share insights, and connect with some of the most experienced innovation practitioners in the world. Questions like 'how to promote participation' or 'what are the best practices for idea evaluation' are responded by innovation experts at companies like Emerson, etc. Customers get the most out of the Brightidea experience by having in-depth discussions and best practices tips while connecting with like-minded professional in a private setting.

Anthony Madama, Technical Support Manager at Brightidea, said, "Utilizing the Brightidea Innovation Community forum will allow the conversation to take place among our innovators at anytime. Bridging these innovative minds together could spruce great plethora of new methods and ideas to include in their social innovation programs."

Customers can feel secure in discussing and sharing anything from workflow details to design suggestions and configuration tips and tricks in confidence with community peers. Brightidea customers can join immediately here!

This is part of our One-on-One at BOF video series, featuring interviews from innovation leaders who presented at Kraft's Birds of a Feather Innovation Leaders (BOF) event.

EllisDon, one of the largest building contractors in Canada, was present with their Web Application Manager, Christine Zakrajsek, to discuss the company's innovation strategies. After her presentation we had a chance to catch up with Christine for a quick interview and when asked about how the company defines success, she responded, "We define success at EllisDon about engagement because we believe that engaged employees are happy employees and happy employees are successful business." Christine continued by saying, "once you get the sharing and the engagement, the innovation almost happens naturally, and once you have that natural organic innovation the ROI bubbles up."

Take a look at her exclusive interview below.

Join our BOF Community of Innovation Leaders today and get insights, access, and instant connections to practitioners around the world.

This is part of our One-on-One at BOF video series, featuring interviews from innovation leaders who presented at Kraft's Birds of a Feather Innovation Leaders (BOF) event.

Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), a leading multinational information technology company, brought their IP and Innovation Strategist, Silvi Steigerwald, to BOF where she talked to Brightidea about the company's innovation portal The Garage. We had a chance chat with Silvi directly about how the company utilizes Brightidea and she said, "We also use it to recognize our inventors and idea submitters too. We try to highlight news, hot ideas, so more than just gathering ideas and collaboration we use it as a communication vehicle."

Watch Silvi's full interview below.

Join our BOF Community of Innovation Leaders today and get insights, access, and instant connections to practitioners around the world.

Guest Post by Vicki Catalina:

Open Innovation & Idea Manager,
Owens-Illinois(O-I)

Owens-Illinois (NYSE: OI), was in the midst of our internal innovation program, "FURNACE", rollout when I attend the latest Birds of a Feather (BOF) meeting in Chicago hosted by Kraft. At BOF, my picture of what and how we could use the site to ignite and expand collaborative innovation was quickly enhanced.

Take-aways from the BOF event:

1. Making friends with your 'likes'. Innovators and believers in innovation tend to see things differently. The diversity of companies (HP, Cisco, Avnet, Farm Credit, Emerson, Ellis Don, Kraft, GE); smaller, new, larger…from hospital systems, insurance, electronic, foods…a true testament that the majority of business types know that to be successful over the long term a strong innovative culture is a top priority. Great diverse group of people with common visions for innovation; as Paul said, "You are what you share."

2. Success and Failure is part of the game. Inspiring people to CONTRIBUTE, especially in grey areas or farther-out-there ideas, has to be continually encouraged and awarded. Interestingly, I just read "Better Ideas Through Failure" in WSJ, where the Grey Group in New York developed the "Heroic Failure" award to encourage risk-taking, to award ideas that are "edgier or riskier, or new and totally unproven." Recognition and promotion are crucial for insistent and compelling involvement, though most importantly "know your company's style".

   Tools of the trade. Tweet ups, site teasers, events, blasts, video, quotes, Iphones for immediate interaction, all become forms of communication to keep collaboration continuing. Companies shared unique applications they used to keep things new and exciting, like photo challenges, design competitions, brainstorming sessions, consumer studies like 'A Day in the Life of" or "Show me how you…"

3. Inspiration – Sarah Muller Caldicott, granddaughter of Edison, President of PowerPatterns, and author, Innovate Like Edison. Her stories and passion for innovation was moving and inspiring. One of Edison's mantras: Focus on business results.

I left the session excited and proud of the Innovation Program at O-I. By attending BOF I realized FURNACE can be developed to the likes of an Ecomagination, highly productive and participative. Brightidea provided a comfortable, open environment that top line companies openly shared their failures, successes, innovative challenges and organizations. Kraft, as to be expected, did a fantastic job at hosting the event.

About the Author: Vicki Catalina is an Open Innovation & Idea Manager at Owens-Illinois and is based in Toledo, OH and likes a challenge (anything from a business solution to running a marathon) and family-time.

Emerson (NYSE: EMR), is a $21B global leader in bringing technology and engineering together to provide innovative solutions. The company has been using Brightidea led by the Embedded Computing & Power group to power its innovation management initiatives for the past few years. Recently, Emerson hosted an Innovation and Technology Conference in St. Louis, MO, featuring over thirty presentations on technology, materials, new product development and innovation by various speakers from companies such as Cisco, Verizon, and IDEO. Bob Aylsworth, Chief Innovation Officier for Embedded Computing & Power, shared best practices in innovation management. Brightidea's COO Vincent Carbone also participated in the event by joining a panel discussion on Creating & Sustaining a Culture of Innovation in which he talked about the innovation processes facilitated by Brightidea software.

Emerson is dedicated to innovation, and André St-Martin, Lead Innovation Strategist, has attended three of our Birds of Feather Innovation Leaders (BOF) events to learn and share ideas on best practices. At our BOF in Hong Kong, André discussed the challenges in innovation, particularly on the review processes, saying, "one of the biggest challenges is about the balance of expectation of quick results and having to work/nurture/incubate ideas."

 Join our BOF Community of Innovation Leaders today and get insights, access, and instant connections to practitioners around the world.

Watch his exclusive presentation and get insights on Innovation at Work at Emerson.

Emerson (NYSE: EMR), based in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), is a global leader in bringing technology and engineering together to provide innovative solutions to customers in industrial, commercial, and consumer markets through its network power, process management, industrial automation, climate technologies, and tools and storage businesses.  Sales in fiscal 2010 were $21 billion

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.

Brightidea's latest case study features ProdigyWorks, a unique New York-based business-consulting firm that brings together experts and creative thinkers from around the globe to solve innovation challenges. The firm uses Brightidea software to power dozens of successful engagements for globally recognized brands. Combined with their unique methodology, Brightidea helps ProdigyWorks tap key groups and demographics to source a broader scope of ideas, delivering breakthrough innovations that ultimately provide new revenue opportunities. Why Brightidea? 

 "I interviewed a number of firms and landed on Brightidea, which offered the most comprehensive collaboration solution that was available to me," said David Wynett, Managing Director of ProdigyWorks.

This exclusive case study highlights ProdigyWorks' engagements with The Coca-Cola Company on naming a new product line for Illy, a campaign focused on enhancing current products for Braun, and a challenge to identify new market opportunities for HP.

Gain exclusive insights on how ProdigyWorks uses Brightidea software to source ideas in a dynamic and collaborative environment. Find out how campaigns are  designed to encourage and sustain participation while easing evaluation and decision-making for successful engagements with:

 Download the ProdigyWorks case study today!