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

Overview: 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, specific people to be alerted to ideas or invited to weigh in, and flexible tools to enable people 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 features and approaches. It can be as simple as an online suggestion box or as complex as you want it to be.

On the IdeaScale platform, it’s where the rubber meets the road. To get the most out of the platform, it needs ideas to function. That’s why it’s been designed 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 seldom get 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 platform with precisely the features you want. Custom forms help you ask just the questions you most need the answers to and are easy to tweak as your innovation strategy develops.

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) into the platform for people who want to just click a button and be logged in.
• Responsive Mobile Design: Our platform is effective on mobile immediately out of the box, making it easier to use for employees in the field and when they’ve got a minute and can get to their idea submission.
• 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 opening a form.
• Email Submissions: Especially for companies with many staff out in the field, email submissions help them get their ideas in and feel included. They can also get email alerts, allowing them to participate wherever they are.
• Embeddable Widgets: Ideal for company intranets and crowdsourcing, you can also place IdeaScale widgets on your site and gather ideas there.
• Multimedia Attachments: It’s better to show than to tell, and in some cases, it may be the only way to understand the idea. Our attachments support allows your team to file 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

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. Hence, we’ve incorporated a string of collaboration features into the platform.

• Similarity Search: One of the greatest fears of many people is their idea has already been conceived. Similarity Search helps relieve this fear 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 needed innovation.
• Flexible Anonymity: You can configure the form to the degree of anonymity you think will be valuable. Even the most inclusive, friendly team can have people who are just too 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, they’ve become useful as communication methods in their own right. @mentions allow your team to easily “tag in” people to expand on the idea, discuss their perspective, and otherwise weigh in. This can also help you spot stakeholders in the process and people invested in ideas that you might not otherwise be aware of.
• Peer-to-Peer Recognition: Coworkers can thank each other for their help on the platform, bolstering engagement.

Community Management

Keeping your community focused and on track is key. In the back end, you can do that with a powerful moderation dashboard with tools to configure settings, streamline discussions, and closed 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 needs of your organization. They’re also made to be scalable over time.

We’ve found that as innovation programs catch on and expand, there’s often a need to rapidly implement new features. Companies merge with new companies, 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.

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

This article was originally published on the IdeaScale blog here.