Innovation Management News & Articles

Getting customer feedback into new products has always been a good idea.  Now Pleasanton, CA based Spigit, a self-described crowd innovation company, is making a game of that process with its new FaceOff application. By turning voting on brand directions into a game, the company looks to engage their customers while generating new ideas.

The enterprise has empowerment issues. First it was their customers; then it was their employees. The consumerization of IT has overwhelmed organizations. For a while it was manageable to deny their technology requests. By now, most companies have come to realize that employees and customers will continue to empower themselves and they can’t exert as much control as they want. To help them best prepare for the empowered road ahead, Forrester has analyzed the highest-impact empowered employee technologies by evaluating their maturity and business value.

With an eye on all phases of the enterprise innovation cycle, Imaginatik has launched Results Engine, a back-end platform that brings ideas into fruition. 

Intuit (news, site) is throwing its hat into the Enterprise 2.0 world with its new Web-based innovation and idea management tool, Brainstorm, designed to spur the free exchange of new ideas within organizations.

Inmagic (news, site) has created a new application on top of its Presto, innovation management platform. IdeaNet is designed to generate product ideas and manage the idea development process.

Consider product innovation for a moment. How do you go about deciding what features and functionality to build into your next release? How do you ensure you’re developing and building technology in accordance with your customers’ needs? Do you even have an innovation process?

Things happen quickly in the industry, including changes in employment. Here's a quick and dirty list of the biggest moves that hit our radar over the last couple of weeks: 

When your business is public relations, you know that creativity is essential to your PR mix. Where is one of the best places to find new, innovative ideas? In our universities. That's what Ketchum PR found. Here's a look at their private community: Mindfire.

Granicus (news, site) announced the acquisition of Daystar Computer Systems this week, resulting in the combination of cloud-based government transparency tools and agenda management products. Together, the companies hope to boost innovation and enrich transparency, legislative workflows, and citizen collaboration.

In part one of the Idea-driven Workforce, we discussed ways to engage employees in innovation and the five characteristics of effective employee innovation. In part two, we will look at operating a successful employee-driven innovation program in your organization -- what works and what doesn't. 

The ability to generate, assess and rapidly deploy new ideas in any economic cycle -- a notion of sustainable innovation -- has become a critical capability in today’s environment. Emerging trends and new technologies can become market-dominant forces in a matter of months, and consumers have been trained to upgrade to new-and-improved features on a regular basis. Organizations need to approach innovation in new ways if they are to keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions. 

While Spigit (news, site) is no stranger to using crowdsourcing techniques within organizations to propagate ideas and spur employees to share and engage -- think: internal suggestion box on steroids -- their launch of SpigitEngage for Facebook has put them squarely in the sights of something, or rather, someone, much larger: YOU.

CorasWorks (news, site) has joined the growing number of vendors building social business solutions on the SharePoint 2010 platform. Perfect for the small- to mid-sized business, CIM 2.0 offers a well rounded suite of tools for innovation management.

 Granicus (news, site) recently revealed a strong Q4, increasing new client additions by 100% over Q4 2009 and exceeding sales results from Q1 and Q2 2010 combined. The surge in the company's numbers not only reflects the effectiveness of their offerings, but also the growing need for open government and transparency initiatives. 

In the world of idea management, even Spigit (news, site) admits that it can be difficult to ensure manual contribution from key authorities. Today's release of Spigit 3.1 and the new SpigitFusion automate that process, promising improvement in the quality of decision-making and pace of innovation.