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Industry Standard: Corporate Crowdsourcing and Innovation's "Dirty Secret"

5 October 2009 - By Ian Lamont

Remember that super idea you had last year for a new service that had real potential to make life easier for customers while boosting revenue for your company? Whatever happened to it? Was it properly aired and vetted within your organization, or did it end up like 99% of good ideas -- briefly tossed around in a conference room or email thread, before being forgotten and overtaken by new priorities?

If your idea falls into the latter category, you're not alone. While large companies know that many of the best product, partnership, and management ideas come from the edges of an organization, not every company has a systematic way of processing them. That's where Imaginatik's Idea Central software comes in. It's a browser-based tool that lets companies leverage a much larger group of employees to internally crowdsource the tasks related to idea generation and better identify those ideas that have real potential. The software is already on version 9, and customers include Reed Elsevier, Chubb, Bombardier and Novartis. Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell recently discussed Idea Central's positioning in the market for collaboration and project management software, plans for future expansion, and the "dirty secret" of idea management and innovation.

The Industry Standard: You're marketing Idea Central as a "collaboration" platform, but it appears to be more of an idea-generation and vetting application. What makes Idea Central comparable with other communication- and project-management focused apps?

Mark Turrell, Imaginatik: Think of it more like a focused blog or wiki, but where the methodology, use and people engagement is absolutely crucial. What's missing from what most people see in the software is human engagement, both software tools and consulting / training methods. For example we have an integrated points system, with reputation and recognition management. Idea Central is also a workflow and business process management tool for innovation: tracking, management, intellectual property etc. This is much more a tool for leaders than a grassroots soap box for ideas.

TIS: Idea generation also requires an execution phase -- does Idea Central include features that support that, or is it meant to be passed off to dedicated project management apps?

Turrell: It can do both. We have a Next Steps Tracking capability (forms, workflow, and reports) and feature set built into the application. Or clients build their own with our 'FlexForms' business application builder. We do have several clients that integrate our front-end content with their back-end project systems. We enable this through APIs and being able to export our data.

There is a 'dirty secret' in this whole area of end-to-end innovation/idea management: ideas do NOT become projects. There is a lot of morphing that takes place, even of the best ideas (most ideas are really idea 'fragments'), so that in practice the top ideas are basically edited, repackaged and resubmitted into different systems. And while we are on the topic of dirty secrets... if you come from the world of product development, not all the best ideas and innovations revolve around 'products'. Many involve strategy, packaging, pricing, channel strategy and other aspects -- none of which are usually covered in a typical PLM (product lifecycle management) or stage-gate product development system. So that means that many of the top concepts -- the ones that in the end make the money -- are basically unmanaged. Idea Central can play a great role in looking after these PLM orphans, providing a non-obvious, lightweight project management system to handle this type of content.

TIS: Most customers (I think the website said 90%) chose the locally installed option, as opposed to the hosted option. Are there pricing or security concerns which might explain this?

Turrell: Sorry, wrong way round!! 90% prefer hosting against internal installation. Several reasons for this. There are much better tools available today, both single sign-on integration tools and security tools, like firewalls, etc. One of the main drivers is the IT department -- they have so much on their plates with expensive SAP implementations and providing basic services like e-mail that they do not have the capacity to support business applications like ours. Typically, the IT dept gets involved in our system less than 1 day -- a year. And that is a good thing for IT and the business. Problem solved faster.

TIS: Where do you see Idea Central in one year, in terms of new features, mobility, and integration with other apps?

Turrell: We have a major new release planned for January 2010 -- Version 10. This will add significant innovations for the user interface, to boost collaboration, and to improve the efficiency of handling the content in our system. We are also doing more work to open our platform to outside vendors, as evidenced recently by our new ChemBioConnect product, a revolution in collaboration for chemistry using the ChemBioDraw product from CambridgeSoft. This is one of those 'smart under the hood' products that not only handle drawing and images, but the logic beneath what the user sees. We use our software platform as a wrapper to their functionality -- and in so doing make a brand new category of business applications. I'd be looking to Imaginatik to provide many more of these over the coming year and beyond.