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Community Powered Portals for Product Feedback
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Ideas
Users post ideas
Collaboration & Votes
Others comment, expand and vote on ideas
Innovation
Act on the the community's ideas
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 The crowdsourced feedback model provides a community setting for customers to share their ideas and expand on the ideas of other customers. The IdeaScale incentive and voting process is extremely important in harnessing this flow of customer ideas and making it an integral component of product innovation strategies.
Romi Mahajan
Director
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We are always on the lookout for innovative research methodologies that provide new insights into the way we deliver our services and believe that IdeaScale has the potential to help us engage and listen to our customers in ways we've never been able to do in the past - and thereby gain significant competitive advantage.
Tim O'Connor
Senior Vice President Marketing
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What is IdeaScale?
IdeaScale enables companies to build living/breathing Digg style communities. IdeaScale is based on the simple model of crowdsourcing. It begins with an idea posted to your IdeaScale community by a user. Each idea can be expanded through comments by the community. The ultimate measure of an idea is determined by a voting system. Any idea can be voted to the top or buried back down to the bottom. It combines the "wisdom of the crowds" concept with Web 2.0 models like Digg.
How IdeaScale Works:
- Users visit a company branded IdeaScale portal
- They post ideas, suggestions and comments
- They may also expand upon other ideas
- They vote other ideas up and down
- Highly rated and expanded ideas automatically "bubble" to the top
Why IdeaScale Works:
Transparent and Collaborative Feedback
Too often users are dissuaded from giving feedback either because they believe that giving feedback will not affect change or feedback is solicited at an inopportune time. The IdeaScale portal allows users to provide feedback in a collaborative model where they can see the kind of feedback other users are providing. They can then improve upon the suggestion using comments and ultimately quantify the feedback by voting the ideas up or down.
Integrated Participation
By integrating points (points for posting ideas, points for voting and points for commenting on other ideas) with the transparent feedback model, a sense of ownership and kinship can be achieved with the participants that is simply not available using other feedback models like surveys.
Unsolicited Feedback Model
Surveys typically are a very intrusive feedback model. Users generally get invited to take surveys via email or a website link. While the website link is not as intrusive as the email invitation, the question of timing is paramount.
Automatic Categorization and Quantification of Open-Ended Text
One of the biggest challenges of surveys is that when soliciting unintended feedback on concepts, they are generally bucketed into open-ended comments. There is a fair amount of "data" in these open-ended comments and it is nearly impossible for researchers and administrators to gather actionable results. The IdeaScale model turns the table and uses the crowdsourcing strategy to allow other users to quantify ideas.
Key Features
Multiple Security Levels
Customizable Categorization
Tagging, Related Ideas
Customizable HTML for Headers/Footers
Personalized Messages
Next Steps?
