BrightIdea Wants To Be Salesforce.com for Innovation Management

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) May 19, 2010

BrightIdea believes that a platform to manage ideas offers more intrinsic value than a sales lead and they are making an enterprise play to become Salesforce.com for Innovation Management. What does that mean exactly? Let's have a look.

Different Flavors of Innovation Management

There aren't a huge number of Innovation Management vendors in the market today, but that could change pretty quickly considering the attention these solutions are getting from organizations.

On one side of the spectrum we see Kindling, which is a relatively new solution that is designed to work primarily as a standalone product. Although Kindling does offer the ability to integration with other applications, they believe organizations need to get the processes working before considering application integration. We also have Spigit who recently picked up US$ 10 million in funding, and took their solution to SharePoint.

BrightIdea sits at the other end of the spectrum offering three solutions that start with the capture of ideas and ends with implementation management. Around since 1999, they are a sizable company with a sizable client base (300+) and according to Vincent Carbone, Founder and COO, the company understands what it takes to turn an idea into projects that are actionable.

BrightIdea Solutions

There are three primary solutions:

WebStorm — The Idea collector, WebStorm collects and manages ideas, solicits feedback and suggestions and runs contests and competitions. WebStorms can be adhoc communities (i.e. for a meeting), or deployed as communities or subcommunities.
Switchboard — The next step in the innovation management process is selecting an idea and resourcing it. Scorecards tie business metrics to an idea, screening and prioritization and resourcing are just some of the features available.
Pipeline — Supports the implementation of an idea through project management and documentation.

SaaS and Easy

BrightIdea can be deployed both on premise and as a SaaS offering. Carbone told us that most of their on premise customers are legacy — 95% of their clients are SaaS. In fact in the last two years, BrightIdea has not sold a single on premise version.

Brightidea and Crowdcast Prediction Market Integration

Carbone also said BrightIdea operates with a strong self-service model. They offer webinars and online training to get customers up to speed quickly. Last quarter, 90% of their revenues were for licenses alone, so the solutions can't be that hard to implement and use.

They also released an iPhone app a couple of months ago for WebStorm.

The BrightIdea Platform

So we've seen the solutions BrightIdea offers, but there's more to this Innovation management story. Other vendors are developing integrated solutions on top of BrightIdeas platform. Integration with reporting, portfolio management, project management and predictions solutions are in the works.

BrightIdea - Dashboard