I’ve worked on several software product development, implementation and support projects (owned many too from a company owner point of view – more on that here: Birth of Enterprise Social). A lot of them have centred around supporting innovation. I’ve even helped with the selection of solutions in this space – more on that here: Technology Selection
I have always believed the invention of new products or services can be a solitary exercise but the diffusion of innovation must be collaborative.
Starting with ideas and moving those forward through multiple iterations, with lots of collaborative input using a technology platform, is one way of supporting that.
Below are the examples of products I have lead and owned the development, implementation and support of based on different platforms.
Confluence idea management solution
Confluence as mentioned, was an enterprise wiki platform and now content collaboration software for modern team work. It was being used by many of my customers as an intranet. It would quite spontaneously be used for logging and tracking ideas but this was not good enough for many organisations. It lacked any specific and intentional, structured way of driving ideas through to conclusion. In the company I ran we developed a custom solution on the back of Confluence that allowed our customers to do just that – see screencast below.
Crowdflo idea management solution
Once we developed our own software platform (covered here) that was also used for generic intranet and extranet work, we looked to replicate the idea management approach we had taken with Confluence. We decided to extend it a little further than just idea management but also provide the means to manage projects that were the result of ideas chosen for implementation. More in the screencast below.