Idea Central Software

Idea Central is a robust and scalable web-based application for Collaborative Innovation and Idea Management. It is an enterprise crowdsourcing platform that allows organizations to maximize the benefits from the Collective Intelligence of their employees, customers, suppliers and other third parties. Idea Central leverages the combined brainpower of an organization to boost revenue growth and profitability, increase collaboration, build sustainability, and streamline process improvements. Its recent releases have been developed in deep collaboration with Imaginatik’s customers.

The software contains specialized features to help focus idea generation toward strategic business objectives, and to capture, develop, and share those ideas securely across an organization. Idea Central also provides a state-of-the-art review process designed to elicit high-quality insight and evaluations from decision makers, with minimum administrative overhead. Add-on modules extend the functionality and use of the system.

Idea Central Walk-through

Below you find a short introduction to Idea Central. Upon request, we offer a guided demo of the software with a detailed explanation of the main features and functionality of the software.

Please contact Imaginatik for more information and to organize an online demo.

Setup: Idea Central is highly configurable

Companies can configure Idea Central to a great extent in order to match their business needs. Some of the configurable options in the setup are the business areas and event-specific questions on the idea form, the guidance and footer for each form, the review criteria and recommendation options, and the security roles.

Organizations deploy several instances of Idea Central to handle different business problems and user communities concurrently. Some customers set up tightly restricted systems for invention disclosure purposes with complex idea and review forms. Their marketing events, on the other hand, are usually left open to encourage the sharing of contributions, and they use a very different configuration.

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The overall look and feel of the application is easy to adjust in order to match corporate guidelines and the needs of an event. The business administrator has complete control over all aspects of an instance's user interface, including the fonts, colors, images, and layout. A series of widgets allows them to determine the information displayed and its location on the screen.

Ease of Use: Idea Central encourages participation

Idea Central provides a welcoming environment for participants to share their suggestions and insight. It is so easy to use that no end-user training is required.

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Imaginatik defines Collective Intelligence as a shared or group intelligence, emerging from various forms of collaboration of many individuals, that is directed toward a common issue. That group intelligence relies on input from individuals, and it was with them in mind that Idea Central was developed to give a positive experience that encourages them to come back again and again.

Background Reading: Collective Intelligence

Personal Spaces within Idea Central allow users to manage all aspects of their participation in an event. They offer easy access to users' contributions to that event (ideas, comments, 5-star ratings), allow them to manage their personal settings (profile, password, IdeaMinders, subscriptions), and help them organize data (in the form of favorites, folders, and saved filters).

Creating a new Idea: Idea Central streamlines idea capture

The idea creation functionality is available from anywhere inside the application. The idea form is quick and easy to complete, and puts no constraints on the type of information accompanying the idea. In order to further lower the barriers for participation, idea authors can be allowed to withhold their identity.

Managers can easily configure the idea form and add extra questions in order to capture event-specific information.

The occurrence of duplicate submissions is reduced via an automatic search. It presents similar ideas to the contributor after the idea title field has been filled out.

Challenges: Idea Central stimulates focused creative input

Inspiring focused creative input is one of the goals of Idea Central. The Challenge facility allows companies to ask specific questions to provoke ideas and comments, highlighting the areas of most interest to executives. Ideas that are created in response to a Challenge are presented together in a view for easy access.

In addition, companies tend to run Idea Central on an "event" basis, collecting ideas on a particular business topic or to support an important project. These two features provide benefits in providing alignment of the creative potential of individuals with current and future business needs.

Background Reading: Event-Based Idea Management

Developing Ideas: Idea Central is a collaborative environment

Idea Central recognizes that transparency fosters a collaborative culture and improves the quality of input. This is achieved by providing general access to suggestions, and by giving people feedback throughout the review process. People from different parts of the organization can read and comment on submitted ideas and their conclusions.

Background Reading: Collaborative Idea Building and  Idea Richness

It is possible to start a private mail communication with the contributor of an idea by simply clicking on a link. In addition, the “Send-A-Link” feature lets participants alert each other to ideas and comments of mutual interest – thus encouraging further widespread collaboration and contribution inside the system.

Background Reading: The Perils of E-Mail Based Idea Management

The IdeaMinder feature enables people to track idea threads so that they get updated when new comments or peer reviews are posted. This encourages further joint development of ideas by speeding up and increasing the amount of collaboration.

The Spotlight Ideas feature allows the review team to highlight ideas for the rest of the audience by tagging them as a Spotlight Idea and posting a corresponding comment. This helps increase awareness and garner discussion around interesting or novel ideas.

The social networking functionality invites participants to find out more about each other and to establish interactions that go beyond the current event. Users can upload a picture and enter a free text description in their profile. Their email address and other available user details can be displayed in their submissions.

Peer Reviews and 5-Star Voting: the informal review process

Idea Central supports two broad types of review process: an informal, unstructured voting process for all contributors, and a formal, structured process for review team members. Our software contains more than 50 features to help manage the evaluation of ideas, and our services and training help clients determine the optimal process and the best tools. For example, the unstructured review process allows participants to share their opinions on an idea via the peer review and the 5-star voting functionality.

The peer review gathers the broad opinions on ideas, and also helps share experiences and tacit knowledge across the organization. Employees rate ideas as "thumbs up," "thumbs down" or "neutral", and comment on them at the same time – in effect, becoming the eyes and ears of the company to promote and develop concepts. Contributors help the formal team by highlighting issues and opportunities regarding particular ideas that may not be immediately apparent, drawing on their experience and expertise. This helps the formal review team focus on the top ideas.

The 5-star voting tool harnesses the wisdom of crowds by inviting participants to vote anonymously on ideas. The average of the votes for an idea is shown inside the idea itself, and the consolidated ranking of all ideas is displayed as a list that can be exported as a CSV file.

Formal Reviews: Idea Central supports an efficient review process

In the structured review process, a team of reviewers analyzes each idea. The reviewer assesses its merit according to a set of configurable criteria and recommends potential next steps. Idea Central supports the work of reviewers by providing personal worklists as well as workflow tools for collaboration, including the notification of unassessed ideas, and the ability to request input from experts.

Background Reading:  How to Create Passion for Someone Else's Idea

Reviewers also have the ability to restrict access to an idea if they feel that it is politically sensitive or malicious or otherwise unsuitable and therefore should not be revealed to everybody.

Reaching a Conclusion: efficient consolidation

The review process consists of two main stages. First individual assessors create their own reviews to an idea. They can also assign a subject matter expert to complete a specialist review of an idea. Recommendations are then aggregated in a conclusion document and a final decision is reached.

Existing paper-based review systems are also supported through the ability to export documents directly into Microsoft Word or Excel for printing.

Conclusions are published in the collaborative space, whereas the access to reviews is restricted to the review team.

Review Space: a private area for the review team

The system provides a dedicated space for the review team which contains e.g. personal reviewer worklists, filtered mass review and mass conclusion lists for the efficient processing of a high volume of ideas, an idea ranking report, and special overview lists.

These tools allow the members of the review team to easily focus on those ideas that belong to their area of expertise and that require most reviewer attention.

Background Reading: Security and Idea Management

Search & Export: powerful search and export functionality

Idea Central has a powerful built-in search engine that allows managers and idea contributors to find useful information from ideas and related materials to address current business issues.

The system contains a full-text search tool that includes word variant and fuzzy word searches automatically. The search functionality is accessible in all parts of the application, and allows users to search on keywords in the full-text of all submissions in the system, including file attachments.

Idea Central also allows users with special rights to create custom reports, and export ideas and their relevant document thread into Word or a spreadsheet program. This functionality supports off-line review processes, detailed statistical analysis, and convenient integration of the data into documents.

Reporting: Idea Central tracks performance

Idea Central measures the progress and success of the organization's Idea Management events with a comprehensive set of reports. It contains powerful overview reporting functionality, including the graphical display in the event management dashboard, the configurable live statistics page, and the progress report which tracks the performance over time. The following formats are available to generate a configurable report: HTML page, XML/RSS page, AJAX/JavaScript, PDF and CSV file.

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Features that generate reports containing the actual data consist of the idea ranking report, the ideas by star rating list, the idea and FlexForm filters, and the event report functionality. Lists of the most read ideas and of the event visitors and their hits are also available.

Tools for reporting on the reviewer activity are provided as well.

Detailed reporting on user activity is available in the Idea Central add-on modules.

Workflow: efficiency through automatic messaging

One of the most important features of Idea Central is the automatic workflow system. Automatic emails, formatted for any standard mail package, such as Microsoft Outlook, are sent out at various points in the idea submission and review stages. For instance, the review process is made more efficient by sending reviewers alerts informing them about unassessed ideas and completed expert reviews.

The text of these mail alerts is fully configurable.

Campaign Management: effortless internal communication

The Campaign Management feature supports the administrator in all phases of the event marketing, from the launch of a campaign through to the close of an event. This communication tool reduces the administrative overhead, increases the participation in events, and ensures that all contributors receive appropriate feedback.

The administrator is able to configure which alerts are enabled and on which dates they are sent out. They can schedule a reminder to ensure that they update the words before the mailing gets sent out. The configurability covers not only the text of the email – even the "author" of each mail can be configured so that it can be sent out on behalf of the senior project sponsor.