I have been covering Spigit and the innovation management market for some time (see Spigit – Enabling Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Through Market Games (2008) and Spigit Increases Employee Engagement in Innovation (2009). I also continue to be a Spigit user as they provide the platform for the Enterprise 2.0 conference submission process. So it nice to see both Spigit and its market continue to grow.  Here is sample from the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

I recently spoke again with Spigit CEO and Co-founder Paul Pluschkell to catch up on their latest news. We began with conversation about the innovation management market. Paul said that the niche has now become a recognized market space like CRM and other genres. According to a Boston Consulting Group report on innovation from 2010, 72 percent of respondents said that their companies consider innovation a top-three priority, versus 64 percent in 2009. In addition, 84 percent of respondents said their companies consider innovation an important or extremely important lever in their ability to reap the benefits of an economic recovery. This need has helped to fuel the innovation market.

I have seen a number of high profile successes in innovation management like Cisco I-Prize (see for example my posts (Cisco Launches Second I-Prize Competition (2010) and Cisco I-Prize: The Cisco Co-Creation Contest (2007).  Spigit has become the platform for Cisco’s new I-Prize “Idea Market,” which provides contest participants with the option to “invest” in the idea they deemed most deserving of the $250,000 grand prize. They are given investment points at the start and then can earn more through active participation in the event. This has helped achieve a three-fold increase in engagement in the second year of the contest.

Paul said creating greater engagement is a major focus of his firm.  They provide a dedicated community manager bundled with their enterprise SaaS fees and employ behavioral science techniques like offering incentives and rewareds to foster this engagement. They now also offer optional professional services for firms that want to create customized reports or extend the platform based in Boulder, CO.

We discussed some of the features in the new S3 release. There are greater analytic capabilities and they added Google Analytics as one step in this direction.  They used their own product to gain customer feedback for new ideas. Some of the ones they implemented include: auto-save at 20 second intervals, widget-based features, drag and drop administration capabilities to make use of these widgets, themes, and the more back end reporting. As part of S3, administrators now have the ability to move ideas across categories and communities. You can also host Spigit on Sharepoint or on its own platform.

Spigit collects a lot of data in the process of managing innovation. Now users can generate custom reports with just a few clicks. These reports are then dynamically updated. Examples include most popular ideas, most popular participants, and what is the stage were each idea is currently located.  This can be used for diagnosis as it can track why certain ideas are getting stuck in particular stages of the process. Spigit also allows clients to benchmark their idea generation process against others based on their aggregated data.

We discussed a few client examples. Met Life has launched 60-day employee idea events. From the hundreds of ideas submitted they have selected six and these have a projected ROI of over 4 million in revenue. Southwest Airlines is using Spigit to management its employee suggestion process. The platform encourages cross-functional collaboration by facilitating transparency and enabling discussions among all work groups. The Spigit platform helps dictate a path for an idea to best become implemented and identifies the most valuable and top participants on the platform. Through an enhanced logical flow of communication between all work departments, new ideas are created along with solutions to problems that executives never knew existed. The ability to define, measure, analyze and implement ideas created a better understanding of process and improvement. I like the effort spent on process, as well as technology here.

Paul said that Spigit had its largest growth of bookings in Q2 2010. They saw a growth of 287 percent compared to the previous quarter and solid growth of 308 percent compared to the same quarter last year. The company doubled their customer base and grew its employee base by 107% since January 1, 2010. This is even more impressive given the general state of the economy.  It shows to me that there is always market for good ideas.  Now there is a market for better ways to management the growth of these ideas.