Challenge Management Features
ID8 is a ‘challenge-driven’ idea management system. Ideation results in ideas are of better quality when they are focussed on solving a particular challenge. Without such a specific challenge, you will get ideas like “Our cafetaria should also really serve cupcakes!”. Thus, to ensure that you will get relevant Ideas when using ID8, you will first have to create a challenge and then ask people to submit ideas to address that challenge.
ID8 has the following features to help you manage your challenges:
Create Challenge Workflow: ID8 provides a workflow mechanism that takes you in a few simple steps through the creation and publishing of a challenge.
Create Bottom-up Challenges: Not all challenges need the input from the whole organization. Your team, department, or workgroup also faces challenges. ID8 makes it possible for anyone to initiate a challenge and solicit ideas from smaller groups of people.
Automatic Newsletters: The ID8 automatic newsletter sends every week an update of the recent activity (new ideas, top traders, activity statistics etc) to all the participants. This helps with keeping the participants in the challenge engaged.
Uploading Users: During the creation of the challenge, you will need to add the participants to it. ID8 created a feature that allows you to upload large numbers of users easily through a MS Excel template.
Idea Approval: Sometimes you want to filter the ideas before they are allowed to be published. With ID8, you can assign ‘Idea Approvers’ in each challenge who will be notified through email when a new idea is ready to be published. This idea approval workflow ensures that only relevant and appropriate ideas enter the challenge.
Idea Categories: Within an ID8, you can configure one or two categories to categorize the ideas within a challenge. These categories are useful because you can filter and sort ideas on these categories.
Idea Management Features
ID8 is an idea management system. Its main purpose is to help organizations create, improve, prioritize, and select ideas. Ideas are at the root of all endavours within an enterprise. Everything starts with an idea. Yet few organizations have solid practices and tools in place to manage their ideas, relying on fragmented databases and unstructured approaches instead.
ID8 has the following features to help you manage your ideas:
Top-down and Bottom-up Ideation: Within an ID8, ideas can be managed top-down and from the bottom-up. By giving teams and workgroups the same tools to manage their ideas as are used for the larger innovation process, ID8 helps improving productivity at all levels.
Microsoft Outlook Integration: ID8 has a Microsoft Outlook plugin. This plugin enables people to use the ID8 features of adding ideas, buying shares in ideas, adding comments, and use Dynamic Voting, all from their familiar and convenient email interface.
Expert Rating: ID8 enables you to identify certain experts within a challenge. These experts can give their opinion about the ideas in a structures manner by rating them on different criteria. The criteria are fully customizable. This expert rating will help your organization with prioritizing and selecting ideas.
Idea Assessments: In addition to allowing certain experts to rate ideas on different criteria, ID8 also allows the public at large to rate the ideas. These idea assessments can be complated by investors, by the idea inventors, or by anyone else who has access to the challenge.
Dynamic Voting: The main crowd-sourcing mechanism for idea evaluation within ID8 is the trading mechanism. However, there are times when the trading may be too much of a good thing, especially for small bottom-up challenges. For these situations, ID8 introduced Dynamic Voting.
Generic System Features
At ID8, we try to make our software as helpful as possible. As such, we introduced a number of generic system features that will help you and the people in your organization to work more effectively on ideas.
ID8 has the following generic system features:
User Groups: In order to invite large groups of users in one go to a challenge, ID8 introduced user groups. These user groups can be created by hand but they can also be created automatically by linking ID8 to your own LDAP directory.
Permissions: ID8 allows you to assign permissions to start top-down and/or bottom-up challenges to different people through roles. You assign the permission to the roles, and then assign the roles either to individual users or to full user groups.
Widgets: The dashboard and each idea overview page use widgets. These small pieces of information and functionality are fully customizable by each user individually.
Parking Lot: Sometimes you have a little idea or a quick thought that you want to write down and then give it some more thought. Within the parking lot, you can park these thoughts and then come back later to them, turning them eitehr into an idea or a challenge.
Quick Polls: When a full challenge may be too much to quick gather some input from people, you can use a quick poll instead. Quick polls can be activated both on the dashboard (where every user would see it) or on a challenge overview page (where only the challenge participants see them).
Search: ID8 has a powerful search function that allows you to search through ideas across all challenges and through all comments, both on active and archived ideas.
Useful applications