IdeaScale and Betterific: A Match Made in Innovation Heaven

Ideascale and Betterific announced at the end of January that they were teaming up to bring the latter’s strengths in crowdsourced open innovation to Ideascale’s industry-leading innovation management platform. So why are they better together? And what can innovation teams expect from the arrival of the Betterific team?

A New Perspective

Betterific’s work has focused on widening the perspective of organizations that can struggle to secure an unbiased external perspective. While internal innovation can be a powerful force, there are situations where you need an outsider’s view, especially when you’re reaching out to a specific market, or trying to break into a new one. While client feedback and customer surveys can be invaluable, often being able to tap into the creativity of your broader audience pays substantial dividends.

To do this, Betterific offers a platform where users join brainstorms where a challenge is posed to its 25,000-strong and growing crowd team. Each brainstorm offers prizes for the best ideas, and the ideas can range from overhauling menus to coming up with new use cases for items. Each can be as broad or as specific as the organizer needs, and then ideas are collected and awarded.

Betterific’s work in crowdsourced open innovation has been used for everything from product design to branding to solving some of the toughest political challenges with which ecological groups struggle. Now, it’ll be combined with IdeaScale’s powerful tools.

A Stronger Team

The two together will extend IdeaScale’s innovation platform to both internal and external use cases. IdeaScale’s innovation management platform is designed for multiple scales of brainstorming and refining, from small teams to organization-wide votes on ideas.

Betterific’s crowd and technology now extend that pipeline toward crowdsourcing and adds a useful next step for both open innovation and more focused approaches. For example, IdeaScale users aiming to develop a snack product can divide up tasks between what should be handled internally, such as product chemistry and manufacturing, and what needs more consumer feedback, such as names, specific flavors, and branding.

It also creates an effective feedback loop to assist in refining ideas and targeted markets. Developing new use cases for products, comparing crowd feedback on features to more specific feedback from vendors and users, and tweaking feature sets for different markets can all be further streamlined and incorporated into the cutting-edge data collection and analysis built into IdeaScale’s platform.

These tools can be used internally as well, building on IdeaScale’s success with open innovation. Organizations can adjust their approaches depending on their needs, such as starting by crowdsourcing internally from their team and gradually opening it up to the wider crowd as well.

Innovation is increasingly the lifeblood of vital companies. As products improve in quality and consumers become more segmented in their needs and more discerning in their purchases, an innovation platform that can move from small teams through the entire pipeline to product launch and beyond will be the heart that keeps that lifeblood pumping.