Brightidea Announces Fall 2016 Release

October 14, 2016 by Business Wire

Class-leading innovation platform expands support for Hackathons and Innovation Labs, applying Lean Startup and Design Thinking principles

SAN FRANCISCO – October 14, 2016 – Brightidea, industry leader in innovation program management software has formally announced its Fall 2016 Product Release. This new release expands the influence of corporate innovation teams with a powerful platform featuring a suite of nine new apps, each dedicated to a specific activity. Brightidea is the only vendor in the industry to develop innovation apps. These apps employ advanced collaboration and crowdsourcing technologies, giving program leaders new ways to innovate and the ability to run multiple initiatives under a single, cohesive platform.

A Platform for Innovation Teams Seeking to Transform their Organizations

A sobering trend has developed on the corporate landscape: the lifespan of companies today is significantly shorter than it was 60 years ago. Whereas S&P 500 companies in 1955 lasted an average of 61 years, today they’re in business for an average of 17 years. Why? Fierce competition has led to rapid and more frequent marketplace disruption. The drive to stay commercially viable nowadays has given rise to the urgency for corporate innovation programs. And that’s where specialized software with dedicated apps comes in.

“This release is much like the early days of the iPhone, which introduced a new platform with the core apps that people would use everyday,” said CEO Matt Greeley. “Similarly, we’re looking forward to the development of additional apps—not only those released by Brightidea, but also from third-party developers.”

After examining over 15 years of data on corporate innovation activities, Brightidea found patterns in customer usage that were key to the development of its Fall 2016 Release. As a result of discovering more than 50 unique types of corporate innovation activity, Brightidea developed the next version of its industry-leading innovation platform with apps to support managing these activities.

“Our portfolio of innovation apps is what makes us unique. Most of our competitors see the world in black and white; they support only a single innovation process,” said Product VP, Genevieve Wang. “In working with hundreds of customers over the years, we’ve learned that the innovation program manager requires different tools for different jobs. So we’ve created a full-spectrum solution to meet that need. The innovation apps are how we do it.”

Nine New Apps for Nine Critical Innovation Functions

Enabling program leaders to repeatedly run key innovation activities at their companies, each Brightidea app is tailored for a specific function. The common thread is their use of advanced collaboration and crowdsourcing technologies to develop new ideas into viable solutions. The platform now includes nine innovation apps, employing progressive strategies such as Lean Startup and Design Thinking and supporting dynamic practices as in hackathons and innovation labs:

• Discuss: To open a company-wide conversation on a key theme, Discuss engages a large number of employees by empowering them with tools to share perspectives and exchange ideas.
• Solve clears a roadblock that’s impeding progress on a key project by crowdsourcing solutions to a previously unsolvable problem.
• Optimize: To make a key area of the business function better, Optimize solicits from employees ideas for incremental improvement.
• Hackathon: Because hackathons are quickly becoming a trend in corporate innovation, Hackathon easily sets up an event to build a prototype, quickly gathers teams for it, and enables the event to be managed entirely online.
• Incubate: Applying Lean Startup principles, Incubate fosters corporate intrapreneurship by providing a safe place for nurturing the riskiest projects, away from the pressures of a business environment.
• Pitch: In the style of a Shark Tank, Pitch enables employees to pitch an idea for a new project that executives can evaluate and grant budget for further development.
• Monitor: To stay abreast of industry developments, Monitor provides a collaborative space for employees to converse on market trends, post new information, and be notified of updates in real time.
• Understand: Applying Design Thinking principles, Understand quickly provides customer insights by empowering a research team to set up a large-scale project where employees can contribute information.
• Suggest: As an accountable and trackable suggestion box, Suggest gathers ideas from employees and drives them to resolution by routing each one to an owner with decision-making power to review and evaluate it.

With its new software platform, along with setup and implementation services for each app, Brightidea can now help innovation program managers to create a vision and action plan to gain full support and alignment from senior leadership. To ensure continuation of that support, the platform enables these managers to demonstrate increasing impact from their programs by running a multitude of innovation activities, tracking their progress, and quantifying their program’s ROI.

“Brightidea got us up and running rather quickly and easily. Since we started, we’ve tracked $350 million in innovation outcomes.” said Steve Healey, Head of New Ideas for British Telecom. “That’s a return to the business of over $75 for every $1 invested in our program.”

Because corporate innovation programs involve more than just a core team and operate as a fully shared service, they oversee what ideally is an enterprise-wide endeavor to innovate in every possible area. Through crowdsourcing and mass-scale collaboration the apps help program managers to foster a culture of innovation. As a result, innovation teams can broaden the roles, responsibilities, and influence they have in their organizations, and ultimately lead the charge in differentiating their companies in the marketplace.

Media Contact
Nikitas Magel
Brightidea, Inc.
nmagel@brightidea.com