Intuit Brainstorm Provides Innovation Management and Collaboration

by Bill Ives

September 9, 2009 at 3:39 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I know what you might be thinking, but innovation management is not really an oxymoron. There is much more to bringing innovation to the realization of business value than the light bulb going off within an individual. In reality, as Tad Milbourn, at Intuit, the Product Manager for Intuit Brainstorm and I discussed, most creativity is a group process. This is true for most, if not all, forms of creativity, not simply that in business. Tad told me that Intuit offers unstructured time to many employees to work on their own ideas independent of the tasks they are currently assigned.

Intuit Brainstorm is actually the result of a project that started during unstructured time. It is designed to better manage innovation efforts begun within organizations of 500 or more employees to properly leverage its crowd sourcing capabilities. Intuit has supported employee innovation for some time. Until Intuit Brainstorm, they used a structured database to track the efforts. This tool was not fully used and, when used, it was updated only about a third of time.

Intuit Brainstorm was designed by employees operating as innovators, rather than as a tool for senior management to track the status of efforts. It was designed to meet the needs of these innovators. It enables innovators to build a team, get help, grow ideas, and collaborate. As a byproduct, it also tracks the status of efforts, but in a more accurate manner than its predecessor because of the increased participation. Here is screen shot of the home page.

intuit-brainstorm-home-page

Currently, there are over 200 ideas preparing for release, representing a wide variety of innovations for both internal use and the marketplace. There are over 4,000 comments on these ideas. One of the new products is ViewMyPaycCheck which allows the employees of small businesses to view the details behind their pay check in the same detailed manner often offered by large organizations with comprehensive HR systems. This new product was developed in three months through Brainstorm.

Within Brainstorm there is an auto-generated activity stream where anyone can see comments on ideas in the pipeline in a real time manner. You start the process by adding you idea by adding your idea through a lightweight submission form. Brainstorm will instantly show related ideas to your idea upon submission. So you can connect with those team members.

Team members can edit the details of a registered idea and others can provide comments. These comments can start a threaded conversation. Contributors take these comments seriously and Brainstorm added the ability to edit comments at the request of users. You can recruit people and people can also request to join a team. The system also makes recommendations on who might be a best fit for the team based on their activity and tags within the system. You can place help wanted ads asking for help. You can also get updates on the tags you follow.

They added Outlook integration to allow you to reach out to other employees and bring them into the Intuit Brainstorm network. The system also indentifies top contributors to provide recognition. You can see the most active, top commentors, and top taggers over the last week, last month or all time. Adding this “leaderboard” increased comments by thirty percent. Brainstorm increased participation in innovation by 500% and increased ideation by 1,000% at Intuit. Here is a sample leaderboard.

intuit-brainstorm-leaderboard

Senior executives are able to track the thousands of ideas by such factors as: area, most active, and other statistics. There is also a comprehensive search. You can find both ideas and people who might be able to help with them. I think this is a great tool and I look forward to its arrival on the marketplace. Innovation needs more than creativity to grow. This tool was built from the innovator’s perspective by innovators so it has the right focus and approach.

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@Natalie Intuit Brainstorm is currently in what you could call a private beta. So there’s no web site or anything. I’m more than happy to talk to you about Brainstorm if you think its something that could benefit your organization. Shoot me a message on Twitter @tadmilbourn. Or respond to this comment. Whatever’s easiest for you.

@Joe that’s a fair assessment from what you can take away in this blog post. It’s hard to see how it’s different from a couple of screenshots. What I will say is that our approach is different from BrightIdea and CrispyIdeas (hadn’t heard of CrispyIdeas…thanks for bringing them up). Intuit Brainstorm is focused on the innovators that are trying to grow and refine their ideas over time. It’s about helping that innovator or team push their idea forward within an organization.

From looking at BrightIdea and CrispyIdeas, they appear to be more about making sense of a massive amount of ideas through community voting. So, if you get 1,000 ideas submitted, how do you figure out which are the 5 that your organization needs to focus on. BrightIdea and CrispyIdeas can help you out there.

I think both are valid approaches and can be used at different times depending on your organization’s goals.

[...] the rest of us. (For more on Brainstorm, including screenshots, please also see Bill Ives’ post.)Tad [...]

I know you mentioned this is not ready for release yet but Is there a free version of Brainstorm available that I could download and play with or a demo of some sort?

As I said there, there’s no demo yet, but if you’d like to see more, I’d be more than happy to show you. Shoot me an email at tad_milbourn@intuit.com.

[...] Intuit Brainstorm Provides Innovation Management and Collaboration | The AppGap (tags: Intuit Brainstorm e2.0 enterprise2.0 collaboration innovation) Share and Enjoy: [...]

Just to be clear, Intuit Brainstorm is no longer in Beta (and hasn’t been for nearly a year). You can find out more at http://www.intuitbrainstorm.com.

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