Spigit: Getting the right idea

San Francisco-based innovation management vendor Spigit provides a SaaS-based toolset that supports the idea generation, evaluation and selection aspects of the idea lifecycle, providing sophisticated tools that ensure that the best – not just the most popular – ideas can be identified for action. With support for multiple, concurrent innovation processes and challenges across an organisation, Spigit is currently the largest vendor in this emerging market.

Top takeaways

A comprehensive solution for idea generation, evaluation and selection, designed for enterprises

Spigit’s SaaS-based innovation management platform provides a rich set of features to support the major stages in the idea lifecycle, right up to the point where an idea is selected for development into a formal development programme. With an approach that supports a portfolio of innovation programmes across an organisation, Spigit has equipped its product with a range of capabilities that focus on taking the pressure off innovation managers and select committees for identifying the best ideas to implement, including tools that enlist the skills and perspectives of a broader community to help enrich and develop ideas, qualify their potential, and enable the most worthwhile to bubble to the top.

Spigit is the largest vendor in innovation management, and it’s growing quickly

Buoyed by continuous growth in Spigit sales over the last six quarters, the company sees huge potential in innovation management, to the point that parent company Mindjet recently divested its previous flagship offering MindManager, announcing its intention to focus solely on the Spigit product and changing its company name to Spigit Corporation. Recent investment secured by the company is focused on building the firm’s brand and global presence, and reinforcing R&D in the Spigit product.

A packaged approach will help Spigit build on its leadership position

The Spigit platform is flexible and configurable, and it’s well-suited to initiatives led by the innovation practices of systems integrators – but may it be daunting for organisations embarking on an innovation initiative without such guidance. Spigit should consider a more sophisticated approach to how it packages its technology; one that targets specific use cases with relevant configurations and templates, to help organisations get started with the platform more quickly.

A big fish in a small (but expanding) pond

Targeting a sector that is drawing increasing market interest and has the advantage of a much clearer ROI than many other collaborative technologies, innovation management vendor Spigit is well-positioned and growing fast. In August the company announced new customer sales growth of 120% for the most recent quarter, and 60% total sales growth for the first half of 2016, notching up its sixth consecutive quarter of record results. Although the brand may be unfamiliar to those outside the innovation space, Spigit is in fact the largest player in the sector, with 125 employees and almost 200 customers, and it has built up a strong profile in the emerging innovation market.

The company – which is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Australia, France, Germany and the UK – was founded in 2008, and in 2013 it was acquired by Mindjet. Since then, Mindjet has decided its future lies wholeheartedly in innovation; the company has now sold its existing MindManager business to Corel, and is changing its name to Spigit Corporation to cement this new direction.

So what does it do? The Spigit technology is designed to help organisations implement a more structured approach to facilitating and driving innovation both inside and outside its corporate boundaries, both in terms of the “ideation” process (the generation, capturing and development of ideas) and the process of identifying which of these ideas provide the best opportunities.

This latter aspect is a key area of differentiation for Spigit. It employs a mix of analytics, automation and carefully-targeted crowdsourcing techniques to help narrow down lists of ideas, making the selection process easier for innovation managers and other decision makers across the business, and ensuring that the ideas with the greatest potential receive the investment they need to deliver results.

The Spigit innovation management platform

Spigit’s SaaS-based platform supports two different approaches to innovation: time-limited “challenges” that concentrate on solving very specific business problems, and continuous improvement strategies, such as traditional “suggestion box” models, that are more ad hoc in nature. The latter can be organised into categories to provide some structure and to help both individuals and innovation managers to navigate the corpus of ideas. Spigit supports multiple, concurrent innovation projects within an organisation’s deployment, organised through separate idea communities that can be branded and themed differently, and can have their own custom set of steps or stages within the innovation process.

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