Innovation & Ideas Management
Set up Innovation Types, collect ideas from your community, review them and, if your organisation uses them, run Innovation Cycles with a jury.
What is this module about?
The Innovation & Ideas module lets your employees share ideas and turn them into business opportunities. With it you can:
Engage employees around innovation challenges.
Collect ideas through a form you design for each challenge, with text, multiple choice, image, PDF and GPS coordinates fields.
Review ideas and give authors feedback by changing each idea's status.
Select the best ideas through likes and comments from the community and, in Innovation Cycles, through jury voting.
If you see Innovation & Ideas in the backoffice side menu, the module is active for your organisation. It contains the pages Dashboard, Ideas List, Innovation Types and, when Innovation Cycles are enabled for your organisation, Innovation Cycles.
The Dashboard page
The Dashboard page shows the Innovation Reports: for each Innovation Type you see Total Ideas, Ideas Under Review, Approved Ideas, Implemented Ideas and Closed Ideas. Use Export Report (xls) to download the ideas of a type as an Excel file.
How do I start building my idea management ecosystem?
1. Create an Innovation Type
Innovation Types are the challenges or areas of innovation where users submit their ideas. They help you divide and manage ideas more easily.
Go to Innovation & Ideas > Innovation Types and click New Innovation Type. Fill in the Name and Description, and optionally upload an Icon and a Banner.
On the same page you can also:
Add Groups to make the Innovation Type available only to specific groups of users.
Add Approvers for the ideas submitted in this type.
What is the Status field?
Each Innovation Type has a Status with three options: Active, Inactive and Archived.
Set it to Active when the type is ready for users to submit ideas.
When a type is Archived, users still see it and its ideas, marked with an "Archived category" tag, but they can no longer add new ideas to it, edit their ideas, comment or like.
2. Build the idea submission form
Each Innovation Type has its own form, managed in the Innovation Type Form Fields section of the Innovation Type page. Click Add Field and choose the Field Type:
Text Field, where you can set Max chars
Multiple Choice Field, with the Choices you define
Upload Image Field
Upload PDF Field
GPS Coordinates Field
For each field you can set a Field name, a Description, and whether it Is required?. Use Move up and Move down to change the order of the fields.
3. Create an Innovation Cycle (if available)
If you see Innovation Cycles in the module menu, you can run time-limited cycles that group several Innovation Types and move ideas through several phases.
Click New Innovation Cycle, fill in the Name and Description, optionally add an Icon and a Banner, and add the Innovation Cycle Types that belong to the cycle.
Then, in Innovation Cycle Phases, click Add Cycle Phase. For each phase you define:
Name and Description
Phase Start date and Phase End date
Is open for submittion?, to accept new ideas in this phase
Number of Ideas for next Phase and Number of Winners
The Jury, the users who vote on the ideas of this phase
Users can submit new ideas only while a phase is shown to them as open to new ideas.
What will my users see?
On the platform, users see each Innovation Type available to them (in this example, a "Business Model" challenge) and can submit their ideas using its form:
Other users can like submitted ideas and add comments with suggestions or feedback. If the author sets an idea as private, it is not visible to their co-workers.
Can I reward users in this module?
Yes. You can create badges that give users points and coins. The Innovation & Ideas triggers include:
Submitting an idea, in any Innovation Type or in a specific one
An idea changing to Approved or to Success
An idea reaching a number of likes
Making a number of comments, or receiving a number of comment stars
An idea being evaluated with a given score
I'm the admin. How can I review the ideas from my community?
Go to Innovation & Ideas > Ideas List. You can filter the list by Innovation Type, see the likes and comments of each idea, and export the list with Export Report (xls).
Changing the status of an idea is a simple way to give feedback to its author. Under Actions, click Edit and change the Status:
From Under review you can move the idea to Approved or Closed.
From Approved you can move it to Success or Closed.
When you close an idea you can add a Comment and, if the Innovation Type has closing reasons, choose a Close Reason.
The idea page also shows the idea's field answers, including attached images and PDFs, its authors and the comments from other users.
Can I create a panel to vote on the best ideas?
Yes, with Innovation Cycles. Each phase of a cycle has its own Jury: the users you add vote on the ideas of that phase against the evaluation criteria shown to them.
In the phase list you can Close Votes, Show Ranking, Export Votes (xls) and Close Phase to release the results. The Number of Ideas for next Phase and Number of Winners settings let you narrow the ideas phase by phase until you reach the winners.