How IdeaScale’s Idea Collection Feature Can Help Your Business Encourage, Collect, and Share Ideas

IdeaScale’s Idea Collection tool has a multitude of customization and design options to create the ideal way to tap into your organization’s creativity. It allows ideas to be linked, alerts specific people to ideas and invites them to weigh in. It also offers flexible tools to enable users to present ideas anonymously or not, as they decide.

What Is Idea Collection?

Idea collection is the beating heart of innovation, giving you the starting point to create new products, develop enhanced features or improvements to existing products, or even come up with novel approaches to your business operations. It can be as simple as an online suggestion box or much more complex, with discussions and examples provided by your team.

The IdeaScale platform is where the rubber meets the road. To get the most out of your innovation project, we’ve designed our idea collection platform for maximum flexibility, user-friendliness, and integration into your innovation strategy.

Ease Of Use

We’ve found that the first challenge to submitting an idea is simple friction. As anybody who sends out a mass email can tell you, you almost never can expect a 100% clickthrough rate. So when collecting ideas, we have tools to meet people where they are.

On the back end, IdeaScale is easy to understand and configure, and we offer rapid customer service to help you set up your community with exactly the features you want. Custom forms help you ask just the questions you most need the answers to. And thouse are easy to tweak as your innovation strategy develops.

Features

For your audience, we offer a number of features that help them be creative on their terms:

• Quick Login: If you’ve ever dealt with trying to use a company intranet site while away from your desk, you’ll understand why we designed tools to allow login to IdeaScale platforms with social profiles. We’ve also integrated Single Sign-On (SSO) for easy login.
• Responsive Mobile Design: Our platform is effective on mobile immediately out of the box. Making it simple to use for employees in the field.
• Chat and Social App Integrations: Tools are available to sync IdeaScale’s platform with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, and other workplace tools. So ideas can be submitted straight from them without navigating away from apps you’re already familiar with.
• Email Submissions: Especially for companies with many dispersed, remote or hybrid employees, email submissions help them get their ideas in and feel included. They can also set up email alerts, allowing them to keep up-to-date on new ideas and conversations wherever they are.
• Embeddable Widgets: Ideal for company intranets and crowdsourcing, you can place IdeaScale widgets on your site and gather ideas there.
• Multimedia Attachments: It’s better to show than to tell. In some cases, this may be the most convenient way to understand an idea. Our attachments support allows your team to add photos, videos, text files, and other supporting information to explain where their idea came from or even show it in action.
• Multilingual Translation: Especially for global teams, our translation tools are built to quickly lay out and properly communicate what you’re looking for.

Networking

Features:

The lifeblood of innovation is teamwork. Contrary to the stereotype of the lone inventor in his garage, most brilliant ideas have a team of people to make them happen! So we’ve incorporated a string of collaboration features into the platform:

• Similarity Search: One of the barriers to sharing an idea is the fear that someone else has already thought of it. Similarity Search helps relieve this anxiety by going through ideas and seeing how unique they are. It’s also useful for you, as multiple people submitting the same concept can alert you to a needed innovation.
• Flexible Anonymity: You can configure the idea submission form to the degree of anonymity you think will be most valuable to your team or project. Even the most inclusive, friendly team can have people who are a bit shy to speak up, so allowing them to decide what anonymity level they’re comfortable with gives them the voice they want.
• Email Notifications: Everybody’s got work to do, and they may not be able to follow an idea unfolding in real-time. Email notifications will keep them in the loop and engaged with their ideas and others.
• @Mentions: As the grammar of social media eases its way into other forms of communication, it’s become one of the easiest and accessible ways to engage with other people online. @mentions allow your team to easily tag-in people to expand on the idea, discuss their perspective, and provide insights. This can also help you spot stakeholders in the process, and identify people invested in ideas that you might not otherwise be aware of.
• Peer-to-Peer Recognition: Coworkers can thank each other for their help or provide kudos on the platform, bolstering engagement.

Community Management

Keeping your community focused and on track is key. From the back end, you can accomplish this with a powerful moderation dashboard with tools to configure settings, streamline discussions, and close out idea threads that have been settled.

On the front end, voting and comments help you sort out the best ideas. Encouraging, respectful remarks and voting on preferred ideas give you a sense of what’s most needed while keeping the innovation process democratic and engaging.

Mixing and Matching

All of these tools are built to be configurable to precisely the degree that you need and to fit the priorities of your organization. They’re also made to be scalable over time.

As innovation programs catch on and expand, there’s usually a need to rapidly implement new features. Companies merge with new companies and tap into new markets and add more staff. Or business models change, and where people used to be close together, now they’re far apart.

You can start with a small, direct platform. As your needs change, you can add and update parts as needed. As your innovation strategy changes, your innovation platform will adapt to it.

Innovation is the lifeblood of any organization. Keeping that lifeblood flowing is what our Idea Submission form does best. To learn more about how IdeaScale can upgrade innovation in your company, request a demo!