Mercury's Blog - Latest Comments in A review of idea and innovation software

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:21:40 -0000

Thanks, Jeffrey. Will definitely take a look at it and include it in an updated post.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Jeffrey Baumgartner — Mon, 25 May 2009 12:01:17 -0000

Have you looked at Jenni innovation process management? Details at http://www.jpb.com/jenni/in...

We'd be happy to arrange a demo for you...

Jeffrey Baumgartner

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 13:22:27 -0000

Thanks, Hutch. I appreciate the additional info.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Hutch Carpenter — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:52:11 -0000

Hi Jed -

Thanks for including Spigit in your write-up. You're right - we are seeing great uptake by enterprise customers. Managing the multiple sources of ideas, and filtering for those that are most useful, is an *idea* that is taking root in the corporate world.

You raise some good questions about us, and I'll answer them here. First, in terms of complexity vs simplicity. The platform is actually quite easy for employees, customers and partners to use. It leverages some of the best practices one finds for social software: votes, tags, discussion forums, clickable reviews, wikis, blogs. We also provide a market for users to buy and sell ideas. Any or all of these are available for use when deployed, internally or externally.

We put a premium on a superior user experience.

The analytics engine and enterprise workflow of the platform is why companies are signing up for Spigit. Simple popularity contests for ideas do give a single metric - number of votes. Certainly that is a form of simplicity. But it's doesn't come close to mapping to the way innovation really works inside corporations. Spigit has designed-in functionality that reflects the different influence users have in advancing an idea forward.

Spigit's platform has enterprise workflow built-in. Role-based reviews and approvals, quantifiable criteria to advance through stages, and high configurability to adapt to each company's specific processes.

Happy to tell you more about what Spigit is up to. Please drop us a note at info@spigit.com.

Hutch Carpenter
Director of Marketing
Spigit, Inc.
http://spigit.com

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:25:01 -0000

Hi, Jenny. Thanks for commenting.

I have to be honest; based on my understanding of Qualcomm's use of prediction markets, I'm really skeptical of how they're used. I understand that they're using PM's to rank new product/service ideas, which I think is an inappropriate use of PM's. What tends to happen is that people trade/buy those ideas that they think _other_ people will buy, and not necessarily the best ideas. I believe that doing so may find good ideas, but they'll be conventional ideas. The ground-breaking ideas won't get noticed.

That said, if they feel it works for them, that's fine. But I think there are other tools that are better suited for innovation. I'm doing a fair bit of work on this now, and hope to be able to talk about it more widely later this year.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Jenny Ambrozek — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:06:26 -0000

Jed,. Good to see you continuing to push thinking about predction markets, collective intelligence and innovation forward. You might be interested in a piece a colleague and I wrote last year for Inside Knowledge Magazine: http://snurl.com/cmzd5 For me, Carlos dos Santos" use of prediction markets at Qualcomm remains the most evolved and intelligent PM application. His integration of the technology into a thoughtful organizational structure promising the opportuity to present a new product business plan to the C-suite is inspired.

Separately there are some folks to whom I would like to introduce you. Can we please connect via email? I look forward to catching up. If you are on Twitter please share your user name. I'm "sagenet". Thanks

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 04:57:47 -0000

Thanks for that, Mark. I wish you all the best as a public company in these crazy economic times.

Based on your comment, do you feel that some of your competitors play loosely with reality?

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Mark Turrell — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 12:59:32 -0000

CEO of Imaginatik here - it is hard being the only Public Company in your list (which also means we have to tell the truth about what we do - no implications for anyone else) with a 10 year track record. We developed the first Idea Management software - in fact we developed many of the methods being used around the world, including time-based focused challenges and points based programs.

I'd be happy to arrange a demo - and if you did try to get someone from my firm to help out and they did not respond, I'll make sure it does not happen again.

Cheers,

Mark

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 07:04:49 -0000

I'm glad that this was useful to you. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Hans De Keulenaer — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:30:15 -0000

Thanks for this overview. We're at this very moment looking into prediction markets, and your overview couldn't come at a better time.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 11:55:46 -0000

I don't have any direct references, but hope to post more on this topic here soon.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Yazeed — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:28:50 -0000

Does anyone have where i can get information on Best practices for idea review and evaluation.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:48:49 -0000

Hi, Paul, and thanks for replying. It's interesting to hear your views on the marketplace. I agree that innovation as a topic in business is growing, but I'm not always convinced that companies are really taking it seriously. (It can too easily slip into becoming a buzz-word instead of something meaningful.)

I would encourage you to put more screenshots/descriptions of your product on your webpage, with all the bulletpoints it was a bit difficult to tell what your product was really about.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:40:46 -0000

Hi, Geoff, and thanks for replying.

I'd certainly be interested in talking with you in depth. I can be reached at jedDOTchristiansen AT mercury-racDOTcom (with the obvious anti-spam replacements).

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:37:20 -0000

Thanks for the links! I'll look into them and update this...

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Paul Tran — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:30:30 -0000

We at BrightIdea use the term "Innovation Pipeline Management" and not just idea collection with Digg style rankings. Collection of ideas are the easy part...its turning those ideas into reality that takes hard work and good tools. Our Platform product is a mature product with over 300 clients using it today.

An innovation management platform must be flexible (configured in any way towards business processes), easy to use, promotes collaboration (web 2.0), and drives ROI. Without true ROI from the system, it is hard to measure the effectiveness of innovation within an organization. We are heavily focused on ROI with our system.

We view the innovation marketplace to have more and more vendors each year which helps define the space and at the same time validating it. I believe there will be more incorporation of Social Media components in the space to promote collaboration. At the same time, companies will rely more and more on innovation processes to stay competitive. This will release more budget towards innovation consulting services and tool providers. We've seen this change in the market and it reflects on our own business today.

Partnerships will be established within the marketplace. As an example, we've been collaborating with IP.com (intellectual property management of ideas in our system) and Xpree (use Prediction Markets to determine outcomes of ideas in our system). Ultimately, we need to provide more and more value to our clients to keep satisfaction at a high level.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Geoff Carss — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 06:02:20 -0000

Forrester have recently published a number of papers on this emergent market - and it appears other analysts are starting to cover it as well. At Imaginatik we focus on enabling large scale collaborative innovation and problem solving - often company wide in some very large companies. As you suggest - our client references are outstanding - because of the benefits we deliver through our platform and research (we started as a reearch company a few years ago) - one of of clients (Pfizer) made an equity investment - which really demonstrates our value. Happy to take you through what we do at greater length

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Manoj — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:19:56 -0000

Hi Jed,

Excellent summary of the various tools. I was searching for a similar summary. I will add your entry to my Innovation twine - http://www.twine.com/twine/.... You are welcome to join my innovation Twine too.

Manoj

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

msbendts — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:29:26 -0000

A good collection as a starting point..and from the comments dialog the categorization is interesting. Many of them classify themselves as Innovation Managment, but most really fall into just helping you to manage how to collect and sort ideas (what I'd call Idea Management or the "Digg" part of your entry).

I've found very few that can actaully manage the innovation process (from discovery, to ideation, to elaboration, to experimentation, to production). I'd place the MindMatters Innovator product and the BrightIdea's innovation "platform" into that category. (Sorry, haven't looked at the QMarkets stuff yet...)

As you mentioned in your entry, the websites don't give you the best picture of what can happen...getting into the demos (or trial software) opens up what the potential is. The BrightIdea website talks about their WebStorm product, and then some loose concept of an innovation platform...until you get a demo do you realize that the WebStorm is a colletion and ranking tool, and the "platform" is actually a product that they sell (not just a concept) that can help monitor that idea through several stage gate and workflow business rules.

MindMatters Innovator is an even more robust solution for managing that idea through your business, including a very easy transistion into having that idea move into the patent process. Most workflow and business managment solutions focus on business models that are up and operational...the MindMatters tool is a great way to keep track of that fuzzy concept as you are still flushing out the business case.

Kluster (http://www.kluster.com/) is another intriguing offering that is a 'voting' or 'wisdom of the crowds' tool, but offers some very interesting means of how to rank ideas that could be something to learn from.

Others to research and categorize accordingly...
CogniStramer Innovation Portal -- http://www.innovationportal.eu
Creax Innovation Suite -- http://www.creaxinnovations...
Employee Suggestion Box -- https://www.employeesuggest...
IBM Innovation Factory -- http://www-935.ibm.com/serv...
id Force -- http://www.id-force.de
Imagineware -- http://www.imagineware.com/...
Jenni Idea Managment -- http://www.jpb.com/jenni/in...

But, again, thanks for your list and there are some here that I'll poke my nose more into.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Noam Danon — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 09:24:50 -0000

that's harder to separate.
I think there's a scale - ranging from what you call simple/basic ranking systems, to the more enterprise grade complex systems.
I imagine bright idea, Mind matters & Spigit are in our category.

As for interest - I think innovation management is a much more mature market - in terms of vendor selection, and in term of customer requirements & interest.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:56:53 -0000

That's really interesting, and it looks to be a very sensible way of looking at the marketplace.

How do you separate the "pure innovation management" applications from the rest? I'm curious where you would put BrightIdea, Spigit, MindMatters and Rite-Solutions within your categorization.

How does interest in your prediction markets product compare to your idea management product? I know I've heard more about your prediction markets software, but I find it's interesting that you've used a completely different approach (aka, non-market-based) for the idea management software.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Noam Danon — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:43:21 -0000

There's another way to look at it, and that's by categorizing the vendors (and not their solutions). I think it givrs a good picture of the solution as well.
Main categories are:
- Pure innovation management - vendors that put their emphasis here, and provide an end-2-end idea management solution. I'd put the Qmarkets solution here (naturally...), along with Imaginatik, hype, brainbank and maybe more.

- PLM companies - innovation is not their focus. they sell large PLM systems, and idea management is a small add-on module for them. I'm sure they have good solutions, but I would imagine this influences their focus, and the kind of customers that buy it.

- Prediction markets companies - that provide some sort of basic idea ranking along side prediction markets. These companies normally offer 1 solution, that combines prediction markets deep into the idea management. This includes Xpree, and i thing Nosco and others (we thought of this solution, but eventually decided against it, since idea management is totally different).

- big boys - like SalesForces and even IBM or Microsoft - that offer very large systems, and have an idea management features/module. Again, very far from their focus, but probably has their advantages as well.

- marketplaces - this is a very different solution, answering different needs than all the rest. These are online "open innovation" sites.A company can not setup their own idea management process, but rather can use the online community for getting ideas, ranking them and more.

I do not mean to say any of these is better or worse, it's just my way of looking at this market.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

jedc_mercury — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:20:52 -0000

Hi, Noam. Thanks for the reply.

I certainly would encourage showing screenshots, demos, etc. on your site. It would certainly clarify the benefits and the different use cases.

Do you see Imaginatik as a primary competitor? I would be quite interested in your opinions on how the market should be categorized.

Re: A review of idea and innovation software

Noam Danon — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 06:10:48 -0000

Jed,
great summary of all the different vendors and an interesting classification. I agree with most of it.

Personally, i would add another category (I don't have a good name for it) - maybe "End-2-End Idea Management" - which has the "Digg for Ideas" features, along with powerfull process-oriented (work flow) features an enterprise needs.
This is where i would put our own solution (Qmarkets), along with some of the other players (like Imaginatik).
Qmarkets Prediction markets is a different product, that could be integrated into our idea management - but like the quote by NewsFutures, these are two very separate things.

Anyway - thanks for the tip - we'll be sure to add screenshots to our site, alongside the free trials we setup for anyone interested in trying it out (contact me if you want one as well - it is two minutes the setup).

Noam Danon,