Manage ideas across phases.

Who decides when ideas move between phases?

You control who has permission to move ideas from one phase to another. When you set up each phase, you define which roles or specific users have the rights to advance or move ideas through your workflow. This means you decide whether everyone, only admins, or a specific review committee has the authority to progress ideas.

This role-based control ensures your governance requirements are met and keeps your process running smoothly with the right people making decisions at each stage.

How do I create and configure custom phases?

You build your workflow by adding different phase types to match your innovation process. Choose from Comment, Review, Rate, Act, Expand, and Done phases. Each phase type serves a specific purpose, from gathering feedback to assigning owners or collecting detailed business case information.

For each phase you add, you configure who has access, what actions they take, and any restrictions. You name each phase to match your company's terminology, so your team sees the exact workflow they already know.

How do hidden phases work for confidential reviews?

You hide a phase and its content from users who are not invited to participate in that phase. When you enable the hide content setting, uninvited users will not see the phase itself, the ideas in that phase, or activities that happen there.

This feature addresses situations where you need a private review before ideas become public, or when you want engineers to submit ideas without seeing what others have submitted. You decide phase by phase what stays visible and what remains confidential to specific users.

How do I set up an approval gate before ideas become public?

Add a Review phase early in your workflow and restrict visibility of that phase to admins or your review committee. Ideas submitted by contributors enter this hidden Review phase first, where your team evaluates and approves them before moving them to a public Comment or Rate phase.

By combining a hidden Review phase with role-based permissions to move ideas, you create a compliance-friendly approval process where nothing goes public until your team approves it.

How do I limit who rates ideas in each evaluation phase?

When you configure a Rate phase, you define which users or roles have access to contribute ratings. You set up multiple Rate phases if you need different groups to evaluate ideas at different points. For example, all employees rate in the first phase, then subject matter experts rate against more detailed criteria in a second phase.

Each Rate phase has its own rating criteria and access settings, so you control exactly who evaluates what and when they do it.

How do deadlines and time limits work for phases?

You set contribution limits for each phase to control how many times users contribute. While Ideanote does not automatically move ideas based on a clock, you use the Lock Content setting to prevent further edits or ratings after a specific point in your process. This approach lets you close a phase manually once your deadline passes.

For time-based reminders and tracking, you use notifications and reporting features to monitor which ideas need attention and follow up with assignees when action is required.

How do I control commenting and rating across different phases?

You decide for each Comment or Rate phase whether contributions are restricted to only when the idea is in that phase, or whether users continue to contribute even after the idea moves forward. Use the "Restrict Contributions to Phase" setting to lock contributions to a specific phase, or allow unrestricted contributions so users keep commenting throughout the idea's journey.

This flexibility means you build workflows where early feedback phases close after review, while other discussion phases stay open for the entire process.

How do I lock ideas or ratings for compliance?

Use the Lock Content or Lock Activities setting within a phase to prevent changes after ideas or contributions are submitted. When you lock content, ideas become uneditable once they enter that phase. When you lock activities, submitted ratings or form entries become permanent and cannot be changed.

This feature ensures your audit trail remains intact and meets compliance requirements where decisions and evaluations need to stay fixed after a certain point in your process.

How do I reuse workflows across multiple collections?

After you configure a workflow with custom phases in one collection, you duplicate that collection to create a new one with the same phase setup. This approach lets you reuse your phase configuration without rebuilding it from scratch each time you launch a new initiative or campaign.

Each collection holds its own ideas and maintains its own workflow, but starting from a duplicated collection saves time when you run similar processes repeatedly.