IdeaScale Tools for Idea Evaluation

Last week, IdeaScale hosted a webinar with Totem’s Suzan Briganti about methods of evaluating ideas against something other than votes. Although voting and ratings can be an important tool in gaining additional information about what makes an idea valuable, there are numerous ways of structuring and understanding ideas that can help organizations build out their innovation pipeline.

In order to offer some suggestions for how IdeaScale admins can adapt IdeaScale to achieve the tasks that Suzan Briganti outlined in her presentation, we’ve put together a short tour of IdeaScale functionality that will help admins begin the job of prepping ideas for ReviewScale evaluation.

1. Identify Emerging Themes
As ideas begin to come in, it is possible to start articulating themes and then tagging ideas against that pre-defined set of information. This helps identify ideas that meet particular needs and  helps cluster those ideas for evaluation. Developing pre-defined tags and adding them to ideas can happen at any time during the ideation process and beyond.

Learn more about how to set-up pre-defined tags in this short video tutorial.

2. Develop Insights
Insights can be highly useful in helping deliver solutions and in bringing clarity to market research teams. Insights can capture functional problems or emotional ones and have even larger, more complex collective implications to consider.  It is possible to take any promising idea that is pointing at a particular pain point and allowing writers to edit that idea and create an insight.

3. Testing Crowd Ideas
Refining ideas against specific, templated criteria helps to test ideas for relevance, deliverability, and the role they might play in the development of a company. Suzan Briganti suggested a particular template that includes a name, visual, insight, benefit, reason to believe, price reference, and a tagline. Any idea can be edited to include these elements after submission and before final ReviewScale evaluation by any moderator with permission. This means that every idea is measured against the same set of criteria in the final stages. However, it is also possible to set the template at the outset of any challenge so that all idea submitters are sharing their ideas with this criteria in mind. All of these conditions can be added from the administrator view on the back end.

These are just a few of the ways that IdeaScale’s flexible platform can be adapted to parse both qualitative and quantitative information in order to build a sustainable innovation pipeline. If you want to learn more about IdeaScale functionality and how ReviewScale can help prioritize promising ideas, please tune into next month’s webinar.

We’d also be glad to answer any other questions about how to utilize IdeaScale for other programs, as well. Feel free to contact us at any time.

What Does it Mean to “Manage Innovation?”

image courtesy of derek bruff via flickr

There are numerous types of innovation – from incremental and research innovation to disruptive or breakthrough innovation. But for any organization that is working to create a sustainable innovation environment within their company, there is a level of innovation management involved in the process. And although“management” sometimes seems antithetical to the spirit of innovation which encourages freedom and multi-direction dialogue, there are several key ways that management has to funnel that dialogue into impactful results.

One of the key challenges to achieving this goal is finding a method of selecting, rating, and prioritizing potential innovation in a way that tallies with an organization’s overall mission, goals, and capabilities. This is why IdeaScale is introducing ReviewScale to their suite of services.

The benefits of introducing a decision matrix solution roughly align to three categories:

Align innovation to business goals
ReviewScale ensures that every client is able to support ongoing organization goals whether it’s conversion, engagement, web traffic, product usability – each idea is subject to customizable, defined criteria that contributes to the overall success of the business.

Make a business case for innovation
One of the most challenging aspects of any organizational change is helping others to understand the end benefit of each innovation. ReviewScale assigns business value and real numbers to each idea.

Ensure ROI
The crowd provides numerous valuable ideas, but knowing which one to invest in is often a challenge. With ReviewScale, administrators are able to forecast future success with greater ease and deliver results more than 80% of the time.

If you’d like to learn more about IdeaScale’s decision matrix solution, ReviewScale, tune into our complimentary webinar “How to Build a Business Case for Crowdsourced Ideas Using Decision Matrix Software” scheduled for June 10^th at 10 a.m. PDT. Register today!

ReviewScale: How to Build a Business Case for Crowdsourced Ideas Using Decision Matrix Software

image courtesy of kenny louie via flickr

June 10th, 2014 10 am-10:45am PST

How to utilize decision matrix software to ensure that your innovation management program generates ROI.

How do innovation teams ensure that the next change that they have slated for implementation yields a business-impacting ROI? In this webinar, Rob Hoehn will discuss businesses that have both failed and succeeded in planning for the next stage of implementation, while also introducing new tools that ensure ROI.

Webinar Agenda:
– What are the challenges facing innovation management?
– Factors to consider when implementing change
– A demonstration of ReviewScale technology
– Live Q&A

Join our complimentary webinar to learn how other businesses plan for success and utilize ReviewScale to meet their bottom line.  Register today.