Intuitive, scalable platform to launch innovation challenges for your business. Involve customers or employees in solving critical business challenges.
Solving an extraordinary challenge means everyone needs to pull the same rope. But how are you going to involve a large crowd in organized, collaborative innovation that leads to results?
Sending an email to everyone and waiting for replies won't do the trick.
Your company has tons of smart people and engaged customers that would love to work for a better future - but they don't even know about your problem.
With individuals voicing input from their perspective and interference from other groups as well as management bureaucracy, ideas die before they bubble up.
It's tough to organize a constructive process that leaves everyone content and results in actionable solutions. You're going to ruffle feathers and end up with chaos.
Ideanote is an intuitive product that has helped us transform the organizational priority setting process. The customer success team is also exceptional in terms of responsiveness, willingness to work as a partner and providing flexible services.
Source ideas from employees or customers by launching an innovation challenge that focuses people on what matters. Cut through the noise and create the clarity you need across departments, roles, time zones and culture for the solution you are looking for right here and now.
Ideanote is built for sourcing ideas for your strategic initiatives and helps build a more robust innovation culture. Use purpose built Innovation Challenge software helps you call for ideas, collaborate, communicate, and report on responses from your crowd.
Launch your first innovation challenge in just a few clicks and let the power of the crowd solve your challenge. Add a custom domain like myinnovationchallenge.com and have people create profiles, contribute ideas and follow along in the success. Ideanote lets you cut through the noise and works for both internal and open innovation challenges.
Think of the Deadline as a multipurpose tool for the modern-day innovator that helps create a sense of urgency and ties directly into the broad selection of features you will find within Ideanote. For example, use the Deadline to prevent changes to existing contributions or adjustments to ratings after a specific time. Deadlines can be added directly to your ideation templates to streamline your innovation process across teams and workspaces.
Innovation challenges are not just a form. Give your crowd the full experience by letting them show their support for ideas with likes, add comments and browse the activity feed for inspiration. Want to hide ideas or let people stay anonymous? Add a custom field for terms and conditions? No problem, Ideanote's got you covered.
A simple feature, sure, but an essential part of wielding the power of the crowd. When people can signal which ideas and comments are their favorites with a minimal gesture such as the Like, all the golden nuggets will surface on their own without you lifting a finger. Let people help you identify all the value that’s hidden away within the ideas you’re about to collect.
Real value springs from real-time collaboration between diverse groups of people with different skills and backgrounds. Take the bird's eye view and connect large groups people for powerful cross-collaboration or embrace the niche knowledge of experts and assign them to give feedback on individual ideas.
Teeming with life, a feeling of community, and bright sparks of creativity, the Activity Feed lets you enjoy a curated view of recent activities that include the idea-collections you’re participating in, important ideas you’ve interacted with, and more. The Activity Feed is your best mate in keeping a finger on the pulse while still paying attention to the right things. It serves up everything that matters to you and lets you interact with it at your own pace in a convenient layout optimized for getting things done.
Anonymous means that a person's name or identity will not been revealed or given or has been withheld. It can be useful to collect anonymous ideas to make sure that ideas are rated fairly and that people are not judged for their ideas.
Anonymity is a big deal these days. The Internet has become a place where people can share their ideas without fear of reprisal.
Anonymity is a huge topic in today’s society. People are constantly worried about being tracked online or having their personal information stolen. They want to remain private, even though they often don’t realize that anonymity isn't always a good thing.
When you have a company suggestion box for ideas some people might feel more comfortable coming forward with important ideas if they can submit ideas anonymously.
The benefits of using an anonymous idea suggestion box for your company are many:
With Ideanote you can decide if people should be allowed to submit anonymously and to what degree. You can enforce anonymity or let people submit partly anonymous ideas that management can see. You can even let people change their ideas from anonymous back to identifiable ideas that are tied to their names at a later point if relevant.
People who submit ideas will always be able to edit their ideas but their ideas are safe from being identified. Anonymous ideas are not counted in summaries that could identify the owner, they are not shown on the profile of a user and the identity of the submitter is not revealed in the API and integrations either.
Ideas can be submitted by anyone and are stored for as long as you want. Even better, Ideanote comes with an entire idea funnel so you can also prioritize and develop ideas.
Anonymous idea submission is a great way to get employee feedback. But it's important to make sure that the right people can access this tool. For example, managers shouldn't be able to view all ideas submitted by their subordinates. If you allow anonymous idea submissions, you need to put safeguards in place so that no one gets hurt.
If you use Ideanote, you can easily add anonymous idea submission to your website. You can then choose whether users should be able to submit ideas anonymously or not.
You can also implement anonymous idea submission through other methods such as emailing your employees, posting on social media sites or creating a survey.
Ideanote is a free tool that makes it easy to create an anonymous idea submission system. It doesn't matter how old or new your site is; Ideanote works perfectly well with any website, intranet or as a standalone web app.
The most common way to protect an idea is by copyrighting it. Copyright protects the expression of an idea. It's like a legal contract between you and the world that says: "If you use this idea, we'll give you money."
Copyright is important because it gives you exclusive rights to your idea. If someone uses your idea without paying you, they may be infringing your copyright. That means they could face fines or worse.
But there are other ways to protect your idea too.
Patents are another type of intellectual property protection. A patent grants you the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, offering to sell, or importing your invention for a limited time period.
Patents are good if you want to keep people out of your business. For example, if you invent a new product, you might not want everyone else copying your design. But patents don't protect your idea itself. They only cover how you developed it. So if someone copies your idea but does something different with it, they still own their version.
Trade secrets are a bit more complicated than patents. In addition to protecting your idea, trade secret law protects information about your idea. This includes things like formulas, designs, marketing plans, customer lists, and manufacturing processes.
Trade secrets are useful when you want to prevent competitors from stealing your idea. But unlike patents, trade secrets don't grant you exclusive rights to your ideas. Instead, they allow you to keep them secret.
Confidentiality agreements protect your idea in exchange for keeping it confidential. These agreements usually require you to pay a fee to keep your idea private.
Confidentiality agreements aren't always necessary. Sometimes you can just ask your friends and family not to tell anyone about your idea. But confidentiality agreements are often used when you want to keep your idea secret while you develop it.
Non disclosure agreements are similar to confidentiality agreements. They're designed to protect your idea until you've finished developing it.
A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol, or design that identifies your company as the source of a particular product or service.
Trademarks are helpful if you want to stop companies from passing off their products as yours. For example, if your company makes widgets, you might register a trademark so that no one else can call themselves "Widgets Inc."
Licenses are contracts that let you use someone else's idea. For example, if someone has patented a widget, you might license his idea to manufacture and sell it under your name.
Licensing is a great way to protect your idea if you want to share it with others. And it's easier than creating your own unique idea.
Unpublished works include everything you write before you publish it. It doesn't matter whether you plan to publish it or not.
Unpublished works are protected by copyright laws. Copyright laws give authors the exclusive right to copy, distribute, display, and perform their work.
An idea sharing platform for business might have different needs than one for your local sports association. That's why you have the power to limit how much information is shared across the entire process. Ideanote makes it easy to restrict access to certain interactions while still offering a transparent process that can be followed from the sidelines by everyone. Or would you rather have complete airtight secrecy? No problem. You can customize each step of each idea-collection to fit your exact use-case.
Ideas are collected in real time, and they're stored securely on our servers. Data is securely encrypted in transit and at rest.
Identify winners and valuable ideas with flexible leaderboards, inbuilt reporting and outreach tools that help you communicate your story. Give people ownership, keep them involved and reach out to everyone about the impact so you're ready for the next challenge.
Gamify the innovation experience with a bit of friendly competition to boost your numbers across the board. With the different leaderboards available in the Ideanote's Insights panel, Ideanote becomes more than an idea collection tool. Gain insight into the workings of your organization and help identify top innovators or share the many stories of your people's successes to increase engagement over time.
Successful workplace idea management means promoting ownership and letting people build a name for themselves. With Member Profiles, it’s easy for everyone to keep track of their activities, the status of their ideas, and quick-jump to the idea collections they’ve launched. It also sports a neat list of assignments for each user, so no task is left behind.
Beep-boop. Engagement is king, and that’s why Ideanote has an elaborate in-app and email notification system that helps direct people’s attention to where it’s needed. Ideanote will ping you when something important happens and make sure you never miss a beat. You can, of course, adjust the number of notifications to fit your needs, and each person gets to set their preferred notification frequency.
Find the top innovators at your company, discover hidden synergies between teams, or win the day by topping the innovation leaderboards. Ideanote is jam-packed with valuable insights to prove the story of your company’s success.
Ideanote is the innovation challenge app that lets you source ideas from any crowd, large or small. Get the leading platform with all-in-one functionality for launching and monitoring innovation challenges.
Get a platform that understands what a truly successful innovation challenge needs and is fully customizable. Ideanote stays easy to use from your first to multiple challenges.
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We're happy to help when it comes to strategic sparring, technical support or setup questions. Ideanote is easy to get started with (just ask our customers) but if you need us we're there.
"If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect."
For many companies, the biggest challenge is getting employees and customers to innovate. To encourage innovation, we developed a unique, interactive platform that can be used anywhere and on any device. Innovation challenges are a great way to get your employees or customers to think outside the box, explore new ideas, and come up with innovative solutions. Enterprise companies use our software to launch an manage innovation challenges that scale to 100.000+ people.
Launching an innovation challenge has many benefits. A common one is the insight it provides to customers and employees. This is especially true for leaders that are eager to gather insights about what their customers or employees really need. Innovation challenges also create a sense of excitement and enthusiasm among employees. They raise confidence by showing employees they're valued and respected, which can lead to increased productivity.
Innovation Challenges are usually used to get employees to think about ways to improve their current work. However, they can also be used for other purposes, such as understanding customer needs or improving customer service. To set up an Innovation Challenge, you need to identify the area that needs improvement, describe the challenge in detail, and then give specific instructions on how to submit entries. This approach will encourage your employees or customers to think creatively when coming up with solutions for the problem. Companies which engage their customers and employees with innovation challenges were more innovative and had higher-than-average customer satisfaction.
With Ideanote you can launch innovation challenges easily and customize everything from the submission form to the look and feel as well as automate feedback loops for incoming ideas. Identify the best solutions faster with precise evaluation functionality and keep engagement high with a transparent, structured and collaborative process and headboards.
Companies should tap into what their customers and employees want and need. Companies and their leaders will need to adopt a new way of thinking and leading if they want to continue to exist. They can start by asking themselves: What do we offer that is truly valuable? What needs are we fulfilling? How can we better understand our customer or employee's needs?
Businesses of every size — from new startups to enterprise — use Ideanote to launch innovation challenges, engage their people and find critical solutions for their business.
Innovation Challenge Software allows any organization to launch a contest or challenge. It includes everything from options for the type of competition, to how many teams can compete, to sponsorship options and prizes. Innovation challenges let you share a core business challenge with your employees or customers and motivates them to submit solutions with all the context in place to understand the challenge.
Turning problems into innovation challenges is a good way for managers to come up with solutions. Let’s take a look at how it works.
The first step to solving any problem is to ask yourself, "does this need a solution?" The more educated you are about the problem, the easier it will be to solve. For example, identifying that we're not selling enough of our products might lead you to better marketing strategies or changing what's being sold or how it's being sold for better results. Write down why it needs a solution and then some of the reasons why the problem has occurred in the first place. Follow up by considering how urgent this problem is and how other actors in the market approach the problem.
Then take the learning to formulate an innovation challenge question based on where you understand the core of the problem lies and which main stakeholders, what technology or area of the company you might expect a solution from and who would benefit from it.
With a good challenge question, you shouldn't be too focused on a specific solution to the problem. You want your statement to be as broad as possible, not focusing on a specific method or approach. It helps to center the question around the goal or the people benefiting from the solution you are looking for. Make the question specific enough to keep people focused on the problem at hand while keeping it open enough to allow for creative solutions that you wouldn't even expect. For example How might we [help homeowners] by using [new technologies] to [reduce their energy use]?
It is also a good idea to follow up your innovation challenge question with some context to tell the necessary stakeholders why it is important and what can happen if nothing is done.
Here are 15 examples of successful innovation challenges.
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