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Contributed on June 22, 2017

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On the Radar: InnovationCast

Based in Portugal, InnovationCast provides a SaaS-based innovation management tool that has a community-style, social engagement and interaction approach to enabling innovation – whether inside an organisation, or in an externally-facing, open innovation context.

Who?

Based in Lisbon, Portugal, InnovationCast provides a SaaS-based, collaborative innovation management platform, together with consulting services to help organisations plan and deliver their innovation strategies.

What does it do?

The InnovationCast innovation management platform is a social, collaborative tool. It supports both employee-focused innovation, and programmes which engage external parties such as customers or partners. The product includes five key feature areas that span both frontend and backend innovation activities:

• Innovation Radar enables the capture and sharing of news, content and information from inside or outside an organisation that might help to influence or inspire members of the innovation community. A browser bookmarklet is available to allow people to share such “signals” to the platform more easily. Signals can be categorised to particular spaces (see below) or channels, or associated with a particular “target” – for example specific competitors, customers or partners – that the organisation wants to gather market data about.
• Innovation Spaces allow the platform to be divided into different focus areas, for example to address particular themes or organisational departments. As well as hosting relevant challenges, each space can have its own blog, content pages and “channels” (i.e. top-down categories), as well as an email-based newsletter for alerting space members about recent activity relating to the challenge. Each space can have different owners and managers, with specific challenge managers for each challenge if required. InnovationCast provides a set of out-of-the-box roles for permissions, or alternatively the organisation can create their own custom roles.
• Time-based Challenges provide the core structure for idea management within InnovationCast, allowing members of the innovation community to submit ideas to solve a particular business problem or meet a particular goal. Each challenge has a home page, and can have its own customised idea submission form. Challenge managers can use a templated form for idea submission, or can create custom forms using a wizard. Once submitted, ideas can then be voted and commented upon by the community; feedback-based voting prompts people to expand on their vote, explaining why they have voted for/against/undecided, for example. The idea owner can then make adjustments to their idea, and these are clearly highlighted using a “track changes”-style feature. Idea owners can also flag comments as “significant contributions”. Multiple form-based idea evaluation rounds are supported per challenge, with a choice of rank- or criteria-based evaluations.
• Ideas that successfully make it through the evaluation process can then become Opportunities within the platform; here they are assigned a project team who then further explores the idea to define their risks, test against hypotheses and assumptions, and capture qualitative and/or quantitative results to determine whether they should be taken forward.
• Finally, the chosen ideas become Projects, and can be tracked via a project page within InnovationCast that includes a project plan with tasks and milestones, a discussion area and a files area.

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