Brightidea is a popular innovation management software company because they work with businesses of all sizes and have an attractive pricing model.
However, some teams look for alternative innovation management software because Brightidea lacks customization options — meaning it’s hard to configure the platform for unique processes or to support multiple workflows, and integrating the software with other systems can pose challenges (as the platform can be complex to learn and manage).
So, we put together this short list of popular Brightidea alternatives.
We start with a review of our solution, InnovationCast, an innovation management platform designed to facilitate the best practices we’ve learned over the past 10+ years working with corporations on their innovation and collaborative software. We also include five other top-rated software for your consideration.
Continue reading to learn more about InnovationCast, you can also schedule a demo with us here.
1. InnovationCast: Customizable, Scalable Software to Support Each Stage of Innovation Processes
InnovationCast is a thoughtfully designed innovation management platform that helps organizations collect great ideas, give feedback, filter to the best ideas, and work through the evaluation of ideas. It’s designed to make the innovation process transparent and collaborative across the entire organization.
We created InnovationCast for:
Innovation managers who want to centralize innovation management on one platform to facilitate the entire idea lifecycle, from collection to implementation.
Employees who want to participate in organization-wide innovation efforts via a process that’s transparent and easy to use.
Below, we highlight the key features to support the innovation activities of both groups.
You can also read more about our brand story and the decisions we made when designing InnovationCast here: Innovation Management at most companies is broken. Here is how we are fixing it.
Features to Support Innovation Managers
InnovationCast supports each stage of your innovation processes — from the time an idea is raised through evaluation, testing, and launch. Our platform is highly configurable; you can create multiple workflows, set up every stage of your processes, and edit workflows as needed.
Onboarding Employees & Encouraging Them to Participate
Effectively crowdsourcing idea collection and discussion depends on the participation of a wide user base. InnovationCast lets you onboard an unlimited number of users and internally market your innovation projects:
It offers customizable email templates for creating onboarding invitations.
It lets you automate drip campaigns to educate users about your innovation goals and encourage continued engagement.
Successful email campaigns are key to both a smooth deployment and sustaining motivation in innovation efforts, since getting people to stay involved in initiatives like idea collection can be a hurdle.
Designing and Managing Processes
InnovationCast lets you set up validation workflows depending on the category of idea you want to test. For instance, hosting a hackathon will contain certain steps, like creating an event theme and organizing invitations. The platform allows you to configure such a sequence of steps in the platform, and assign roles and responsibilities to each step, all without requiring custom development work.
InnovationCast also comes with a number of templated workflows out of the box, such as one for general business improvements (i.e., continuous improvements) shown below, that you can simply tailor and use. Or you can create your own workflow from scratch.
The software also tracks and automates the progression of innovative ideas through a workflow, tagging the right team members to participate and sending timely notifications.
Features to Involve & Engage Employees
The main ingredient for involving and engaging employees in InnovationCast is crowdsourcing idea collection and discussion. Most organizations collect ideas by just having an open call to submit ideas to a web form or email address.
But this is a non-transparent process where ideas get submitted into a black box, and other employees can’t participate in viewing and leaving feedback for submitted ideas. Also, this doesn’t inform employees of what initiatives are pressing for the organization, so ideas are submitted on random, scattershot topics.
To combat this, InnovationCast provides several distinct ways for employees to submit their ideas, which we describe below.
Read more: How to Build an Organization-Wide Employee Innovation Program
Engage and Innovate with Challenges
First, the platform allows you to solicit ideas around a central topic or theme that we call Challenges. Usually, an employee will post a Challenge that’s tied to an innovation goal; for example, if a healthcare technology company had the innovation goal to develop a system for remote medical assistance in operating theaters, then a suitable challenge might be, “How to Use HoloLens to Transform Healthcare,” as shown below:
Challenges offer:
Idea collection with a strong focus: By centering on specific topics, Challenges direct employees' creativity toward the organization's current priorities, ensuring the ideas collected are aligned with specific initiatives, goals, or pain points.
Better context for ideas: As you can see above, Challenges offer a rich description of the problem or goal at hand. Organizers can include detailed text, images, videos, and other resources to thoroughly explain the context, enabling employees to submit more informed and relevant ideas.
Sense of urgency: Challenges introduce a deadline that encourages employees to participate and share their ideas within a specific time frame.
Challenges focus on issues that are relevant for the organization, providing employees with a clear context, and creating a sense of urgency to submit ideas through deadlines.
Encouraging Continuous Submission with Open Idea Submission
InnovationCast also lets you submit ideas whenever you want through Always-On Idea Submission. Such submitted ideas can be displayed in users’ activity feeds and solicit open discussion from anyone on the platform.
Always-on idea submissions:
Capture diverse ideas submitted spontaneously, which are usually sparked by insights or inspirations.
Encourage broad engagement, as employees know their ideas can be submitted and considered at any time.
Allow employees to respond rapidly to trends or opportunities they notice, which in turn gives organizations a faster response to changing market conditions, technological advances, or competitive threats.
This serendipitous way of submitting ideas is yet another channel offered by InnovationCast for capturing ideas that might otherwise remain unexpressed when using more structured ideation processes.
Leaving Feedback on Others’ Ideas & Challenges
While building InnovationCast, we put major effort into designing an experience that invites discussion and feedback, so we added features to encourage debate and evaluation.
For starters, all idea submission features have a discussion section where you can actively participate. Both idea authors and non-authors alike can see all feedback.
But one feature of our solution that adds particular value is when an idea author can mark a particularly useful or helpful comment as a “significant contribution,” as shown here:
This gives personal recognition to the contributor, giving them a shout-out and steering the discussion towards new, valuable directions.
We also provide a voting feature for users to evaluate ideas. They can vote one of three ways: Good, Not so Good, or Undecided. When users vote, they must also explain why they voted a certain way (why they like, dislike, or feel neutral towards the idea) to add constructive context to their vote.
Authors need to refine their ideas based on community feedback — and the system keeps track of edits in the version history. This allows users to continually refine ideas until they’re promoted to the evaluation phase.
Scouting Insights
Signals (or “Distributed Scouting”) allows people to post new articles they found about news, technologies, and other topics that are relevant to business goals. Others can freely share or comment on these resources, which can, in turn, spark new ideas.
When sharing a new resource, users must explain why it's important and relevant so others can see the Sparknotes and click to read more. This filtering process also ensures all resources are tied to your innovation strategy.
We also provide Innovation Radars so managers can define areas of interest and users know what to source articles about. Radars let users know which topics are underserved in terms of information to understand where to focus research efforts.
Radars surface growth opportunities by highlighting topics that attract more attention due to increased submissions. Users can also explore a specific Radar to examine insights, trends, and related articles.
Activity Feeds
A user’s Activity Feed gives an overview of the current state of innovation in the organization. It’s partly personalized, showing the discussions and ideas a user is following. It also shows newly submitted Challenges or Always-On Ideas to which the user can contribute.
Features to Support an Ongoing Culture of Innovation
The following practices are characteristics of an environment where innovation is encouraged and seen as a shared goal:
Idea development happens out in the open, and everyone is encouraged to participate.
Contributions are positively reinforced and recognized, with successful outcomes and the process of experimentation being rewarded.
Strategic use of internal communications, such as newsletters to celebrate successes, share knowledge and promote a collaborative community of innovation.
Recognition System
InnovationCast lets you create badges and rewards to acknowledge the efforts of individual contributors and help them feel valued. Badges are displayed on employee profiles for all to see.
InnovationCast also lets you award points to employees for making impactful contributions; then points can be redeemed for rewards like extra PTO days, gift cards, brand merchandise, or other items.
Email and Newsletters
As mentioned previously, InnovationCast lets you “nudge” users to stay engaged with automated email reminders. Our solution also offers a library of templates to customize emails and newsletters on a variety of topics, from promoting ongoing Challenges to announcing achievements.
The platform also has a media-rich blogging feature, which allows you to post about similar topics and solicit feedback.
How to Get Started
We partner with companies of all sizes in numerous industries, including healthcare, technology, eCommerce, manufacturing, education, and more. We’ve been named among the Top 10 Best Intranets in user experience by the Nielsen Norman Group.
In addition to our innovation management software, we also offer innovation consulting services to help you develop processes and ensure they are tailored to your unique organizational goals and challenges.
If you think that our features and methodology could benefit your organization, schedule a free demo to explore further.
2. sideways6
sideways6 is integrated idea management software that you use with your existing productivity tools (such as Microsoft Teams and Workplace from Meta) to open innovation efforts to your employee base and enable collaboration. By going to where employees are already working, sideways6 simplifies software adoption and onboarding.
Features
Capture ideas: Capture “Aha” moments via integrations with popular software like Yammer and Workplace by Meta.
Manage ideas: Qualify and track ideas in structured workflows.
Shortlist ideas: Submit ideas for review by your employees or by establishing review panels.
Turn ideas into projects: Develop ideas and track delivery.
Drive engagement: Use sideways6’s template set to send personalized messages at scale.
Measure success: Get idea evaluation metrics and specialized dashboards.
Pricing
For small teams of up to 10 people, the software costs $30 per user annually. Enterprise pricing is separate and you would need to request a demo and explain your requirements.
3. Planbox
Planbox (recently acquired by HYPE) is an end-to-end innovation management solution that covers the entire innovation process from ideation to evaluation. Their team provides both the Planbox platform and pre-onboarding consultations to tailor their innovation management software to support each part of your processes. They cater to small businesses and larger companies across diverse industries.
Features
Tech scouting: Lets you monitor and identify nascent technologies relevant to your innovation goals.
Corporate venturing: Enables exploration of investment and partnership opportunities.
Challenge-driven innovation: Identifies and targets specific problem areas or opportunities to collaboratively develop actionable solutions for them.
Open innovation: Takes a crowdsourcing approach to gathering ideas from employees, customers, partners, and external experts.
Agile central: A project management tool to evaluate and realize ideas.
Portfolio central: Allows you to manage several ongoing innovation projects as a portfolio.
Pricing
User reviews say the platform costs $2 per user monthly, but you can schedule a call with the Planbox team to learn more about their custom software solutions and pricing.
4. HYPE
HYPE Innovation offers consulting services in addition to a software solution to support organizations’ innovation strategies. After an initial consulting phase to define your innovation strategy, they design a workflow to support that strategy and configure the software around client requirements.
Features of HYPE Enterprise Suite
Strategy: A cloud-based platform designed to support collaborative research and trend analysis for informing innovation strategies. It offers a structured and scalable approach to gathering and evaluating trends and topics, aiming to provide organizations with data-driven insights for confident decision-making.
Ideation: A software platform designed to manage the entire lifecycle of ideas, from initial conception to implementation.
Partnering: A tool for managing external innovation partners.
Projects: Configurable tools to turn creative ideas and roadmaps into tangible value.
They also offer Viima for idea management, a platform for collecting and managing ideas. The software allows you to:
Systematically collect ideas from employees and external stakeholders.
Prioritize and develop ideas through a consistent framework.
Analyze your innovation process for bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Automate routine, repetitive tasks around innovation.
Pricing
HYPE does not disclose pricing on its site. Their website provides a form to schedule a discovery call with their experts.
5. Qmarkets
Qmarkets is a comprehensive innovation management software for enterprise businesses that unifies all innovation efforts into one system.
The platform is designed to fulfill the needs of a wide user base and handle large quantities of data by enabling users to orchestrate intelligent crowdsourcing processes for pinpointing, evaluating, and deploying relevant ideas, trends, and insights. Qmarkets counts among its customers Ford, Intel, Coca-Cola, and UBS.
Features
Q-ideate: Idea management software that helps you gather, evaluate, and prioritize ideas. It includes features such as idea submission forms, voting, commenting, and tagging.
Q-optimize: Continuous improvement software that helps you identify, track, and implement improvement opportunities. It includes features such as problem reporting, root cause analysis, and action tracking.
Q-trend: Trend management software that helps you stay ahead of the curve by identifying and analyzing emerging trends. It includes features such as trend reports, competitor analysis, and social media monitoring.
Q-scout: Technology scouting software that helps you connect with startups, experts, and technologies relevant to your industry. It includes features such as a searchable database of innovation partners, collaboration tools, and deal management capabilities.
Q-impact: Innovation portfolio management software that helps you track the progress of your innovation pipeline, measure the impact of your innovation efforts, and optimize your innovation processes. It includes functionality such as portfolio dashboards, KPI tracking, and reporting tools.
Pricing
Qmarkets does not disclose pricing on their website and you must contact them to ask about their pricing.
6. Wazoku
Wazoku is an idea management platform for large enterprises and global companies. The platform offers a variety of tools for collaborating both internally and with outside partners, integrating your innovation workflows with popular productivity software, and assessing where the greatest opportunities for improvement are.
Wazoku counts among its customers HSBC, ExxonMobile, Microsoft, and AstraZeneca.
Features
Internal innovation: Lets you generate ideas within your organization, solicit ideas from challenges, encourage engagement, and run advanced analytics.
Co-creation: Allows organizations to expand their innovation channels to outside partners and to evaluate submitted ideas for implementation.
Open innovation: Gives access to Wozuku Crowd, allowing you to add an external innovation channel featuring partners at universities, startups, and other organizations.
Tech scouting: Lets you create innovation programs with startups in your industry.
Insights & pulse surveys: Create surveys automatically to assess your overall organizational health while monitoring your expansion.
Innovation networks: Lets you take part in Nexus Challenges — global innovation challenges that allow innovation teams from around the globe to brainstorm on solving current issues.
Pricing
Wazoku pricing isn’t available on their site so you have to contact them to receive a quote.
Determining the Right Fit for Your Innovation Program
When looking at innovation platforms to determine if they meet your needs, make sure that they:
Integrate well with existing tools and systems for collaboration, CRM, ERP, and other software.
Offer a friendly user experience that’s easy for all users to navigate, submit ideas, and participate in discussions without needing extensive training.
Allow you to readily customize the platform to fit your organization’s processes and branding, including UI customization and process workflows.
InnovationCast fits into your organization’s existing workflows, and scales across your user base to harness everyone’s creativity and ideas.
Schedule a free demo to see how our solution lets you create a strong culture of innovation.
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