Crowdsourced Innovation Management
4.5/5 (7 reviews)IdeaScale is an easy-to-use, yet powerful solution for the collection of feedback and ideas. IdeaScale was born in the cloud in 2008. In its first year, IdeaScale garnered high-profile government contracts with many prestigious clients like the VA, FCC, and the Office of the President of the United States. With an outstanding foundation of compliance, security, and scalability, IdeaScale quickly expanded into the private and Enterprise sectors, where the solution is now used by many of the world's most recognizable brands.
After a thorough review of all crowdsourcing challenge platforms (and contemplating building our own) we selected IdeaScale to run the Fix California Challenge (http://www.innovateyourstate.org/final_fix_california_challenge_winners_announced) which resulted in over 450 ideas submitted through the online platform and privately as well as thousands of votes and comments. We set a low bar to entry since the design of the project was to encourage public participation and were overwhelmed by the quality, quantity and nature of the discourse of the community. IdeaScale staff were instrumental in the success of the Challenge - working with us closely prior to the launch, during the Challenge to advance stages and address any issues we had, and even after close of the Challenge listening to our experience in order to continue to improve their product. We heartily recommend them to work with!
If executed thoughtfully, crowdsourcing can be a great way for leaders of a bureacratic organization (or any organization) to hear (interactively) from the people doing the actual work, whether they are seeking new ideas or specific information. Ideascale is a great first step to building a strong crowdsourcing program. It's incredibly user-friendly, the site is easy to design, and it's a one-step process for new members to join. The best feature, however, is the customer service. Everyone is incredibly friendly, responsive and helpful (and IT help is literally 24/7!). Our IdeaScale reps went above and well beyond to help us get our program off the ground - they became true partners. IdeaScale is also constantly evolving to provide an even better user experience. You can't go wrong!
We were on this platform in minutes and we started populating our ideas instantly. Addition of members in free version is child's play. We have voting, comments, sharing of links, editing the Landing page, logo addition, moderation, reports, automatic mail alerts etc. (Attachment of files is not possible in Free Version, but this is still OK for us at this stage of evaluation)
We are able to test fully all the features like Leaderboard, We can run multiple campaigns, we have still to start using the other features, but we hope to mature soon and start using these and many other features.
This platform is already a big hit within our core team of Innovation.
So far amongst all the platforms that we have seen adopting this seemed to be a cake walk!
As an organization that has team members that don't sit in front of a computer all day, IdeaScale has been great. Team members can access the site from their home computer or mobile device and send us ideas any time of the day. It is easy for us to interact with members on the site and let them know the status of their suggestions. Reporting on this site could be more robust, but the data is available in raw form. All the folks that work for IdeaScale are great; they are always available to help and are open to suggestions. I highly recommend IdeaScale as an innovation management and team member engagement platform.
IdeaScale offers several tiers of licensing starting at $2500 annually for an SMB license that ladder up to the IdeaScale for the Enterprise subscription. There is also a free option that allows access to small groups of innovators.
Idea Submission and Development: Transparently collect ideas that are matched and merged to reduce redundancies. Community members can add comments, build out proposals, vote on ideas, and more.
Idea Evaluation and Selection: Decision makers can evaluate ideas against pre-set criteria and slate the most promising ideas for projects and development.
Innovation Pipeline Reporting: Report on community engagement, as well as potential impact in the form of revenue generated or potential savings and a company's implementation rate (to help identify and close the gap between selected ideas to delivered ideas).
Industry-Leading Security: IdeaScale is the only innovation management platform with a government level cloud security requirements from FedRAMP.
Idea Routing and Automation: IdeaScale's customizable interface allows you to route appropriate ideas to subject matter experts or company leaders based on who the idea author is or the content of the idea and allows multiple custom workflows within the same community that can align to the methodology used by any line of business.
Below are some frequently asked questions for IdeaScale.
IdeaScale offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: USD 2.00/year
Pricing model: Free, Subscription
Free Trial: Available
IdeaScale offers several tiers of licensing starting at $2500 annually for an SMB license that ladder up to the IdeaScale for the Enterprise subscription. There is also a free option that allows access to small groups of innovators.
IdeaScale offers the following features:
IdeaScale has the following typical customers:
Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Public Administrations, Small Business
IdeaScale supports the following languages:
Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian
IdeaScale has the following pricing plans:
Free, Subscription
IdeaScale supports the following devices:
iPhone, iPad
IdeaScale integrates with the following applications:
Bitium
IdeaScale offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Phone Support, Video Tutorials
Working as a Federal Employee for decades, I have had the opportunity to participate in a host of application development. Consequently, you would think that I wouldn't be impressed by IdeaScale's offerings, but I was in for a very pleasant experience. I was tasked by my Agency's Leadership to develop a Leading Practices Community for the purpose of sharing efficient and effective ideas organizational wide. I thought, I have no experience with this new software, how can I pull this off? Well all that stress could have been avoided had I talked to my IdeaScale SME, Mr. Matt Paulson, prior to my assignment. To make a long story short, Matt showed incredible product knowledge and was essential in having a fully, functional community available in a matter of weeks. Additionally, Matt was readily accessible and eager to provide his expert knowledge in the event of requested changes. As a result we have a great tool, which I see as providing an outstanding ROI. The Leading Practices Community will serve 30,000 employees and has the capacity to serve far more. How better could we share effectiveness and efficiency than through this tool? In my opinion IdeaScale offers unequaled product value and impressive customer support. If there are any cons to this program, they haven't surfaced so I have nothing to report.