Innovation has the power to transform industries, disrupt markets, and change the world for the better. But too often, innovation is only accessible to a select few – those with the resources, connections, or expertise to bring their ideas to life.
We believe that innovation should be for all. By democratizing access to innovation, we can unlock the potential of people from all walks of life to solve problems, create new products and services, and drive progress in their organizations and communities.
We are proud to announce key updates to our innovation platform with this fall release, that empower and provide all the necessary tools to run a strong end-to-end innovation process.
Throughout the blog, review all our updates that will be rolling out continuously over the next month, and in addition, check out the conversation between Matt Greeley, CEO, and Katlin Arps, VP of Product, where they discuss the latest release updates and the current state of corporate innovation.
Innovation for All: A Conversation with Katlin Arps & Matt Greeley
As the pace of change continues to accelerate, even managers in traditional business functions like: HR, IT, and Finance are seeking out tools to help their teams be more innovative. This is the most significant shift in corporate innovation in over two decades. Tune in to this podcast to hear how we have updated Brightidea Innovation Cloud to address this shift and what you can do to stay ahead of the curve.
👇 Jump down to read specific updates 👇
👇 Jump down to read specific updates 👇
Integrated Updates to Drive Team Activation
Since the release of Whiteboard in the fall of 2021, we have watched the evolution of how clients are using the tool. Our Whiteboard tool captures the necessity of having all your activity in one place, integrated directly with your platform to better prioritize, rank, and collaborate in a meaningful way.
Feature updates include:
- Integrated prioritization: You can now send unlimited ideas from your pipeline directly into either a stacks or stickies format. Backlog management has never been more flexible to support your team.
- Role accountability: Within our stacks feature, you can now assign actions directly to teammates to better organize and check on progress.
- Productivity tools: Addition of text based tables, that allow you the ability to export to excel. As well as image cropping capabilities.
When we say all in one place, we mean it… If you’re currently using Miro, reach out to your Customer Service rep to find out how you can use our [beta] importer tool to bring all your team’s content over, without missing a beat.
When we say all in one place, we mean it… If you’re currently using Miro, reach out to your Customer Service rep to find out how you can use our [beta] importer tool to bring all your team’s content over, without missing a beat.
Our Most Loved App Just Got an Update
Over the last six months, we have witnessed more than a 300% increase in Hackathon participation within the platform. In response, we conducted interviews, learned from the feedback, and made some much-needed enhancements to better support this growing energy.
New features include:
- Early registration: A join event flow to get an early head count on participants and gauge interest.
- Team building: A new feature that allows Hackathon participants to find, apply, and join teams, as well as project leads to review and accept applicants.
- Administrative control: The ability for admins to control team sizes for those participating.
Project Room Offers Cross-Platform Organization
Project Room is a new feature that will be enabled for all systems. This robust enhancement is an evolution of our existing Team Workspace capabilities and solves the need to augment, track, and better define an idea within your pipeline.
Project Room key features include:
- Team building: Invite team members across the organization to participate and collaborate with.
- Consolidate assets across the platform: Ability to add Business Impact, Whiteboards, Memos, Ideas, and external links all within the space.
- Project management and task tracking: Manage your projects and action items with ease. Within the task feature you can assign tasks to team members, track due dates, and monitor progress through status updates.
Stage Gate Process Now Embedded in Key Platform Workflows
The Stage Gate process is a methodology that improves project outcomes and prevents risk by adding gates, or areas for review, throughout your project plan. This framework is commonly used in innovation planning to increase performance, collaboration, and more thorough benchmarks to track progress.
Now, using the Project Room functionality as a foundation, pipelines can automatically integrate with the space to build out the methodology, integrated directly with our pipeline process.
Updates to the platform include:
- Improvements to workflow: The ability to resend action items when a record re-enters a step, honoring any configuration updates that have been made.
- Streamlined management: Integration with our step configuration to automatically assign stage completion and gate approvals.
- Standard templates: A formatted process is automatically generated, capturing the key milestones and recommended assets included in the process. The templates also utilize Brightidea tools like Whiteboard forms and Memo.
A New AI Assistant for Tech Scouting
New with this release is an AI integration within our Scout app. This allows admins to source ideas through AI and inject those responses directly into their pipeline to then monitor and track, ensuring teams are capturing all current startups and competitors in their market.
And reminder, with our previous release, we have key areas where AI is already within the platform including AI assist within the idea submission process, image generation, and in Whiteboard throughout team collaborative sessions.
Dedicated Tools to Scale Through the Enterprise
We are introducing a new way to position the Idea Box app within your department by incorporating our team site view. This update provides the following benefits:
- Security and access: Ability to siphon off access to key team members within various departments to help manage their innovation activities independently.
- Structured, direct navigation: The UI has been updated to better highlight the most important aspects of managing and participating in an Idea Box challenge.
- All-in-one pipeline management: Communities and sub-pipelines can be set up to route ideas based on their maturity, subject matter expertise, timing, and other factors.
- Fine-tuned dashboards: Surfaces key site analytics to the entire team to define and understand success criteria and engagement.
INNOVATION FOR ALL
Innovation within teams, organizations, and entire industries is a responsibility and honor to be shared by all. We aim to empower teams to stave off disruption and meet the opportunities that are realized through recent accelerations. It is everyone’s responsibility to drive forward, to push through the fear and the complexity. Because, simply stated, innovation is too important to be left to chance.
Stay Bright,
Brightidea team
