We have written about other "idea managers" before, including most recently Inmagic. It is a popular area, and one that is covered by a wide range of Intranet-style social media tools, such as Yammer and SocialText that are designed for more general purpose collaboration.

Intuit employees originally created Brainstorm for use, after one employee complained about how their internal communications regarding innovation were lacking. It came out of a tool to manage the personal unstructured time that is so popular in tech companies, and was someone's unstructured time project to develop it. It was so well received that the company decided to make it available to the public.

Since the tool has been deployed about a year ago, Inuit has seen a tremendous growth in its own innovation and has now more than half of its 8,000 employees actively using it.

Rate of participation went up by 500%, the number of ideas created went up by a 1000% and the number of businesses went up by a factor of 6, and time to market went down by 60%.

Brainstorm is SaaS based and costs $5 per user per month for up to 500 users, with lower per-user pricing for higher densities. There is a $500 monthly minimum fee. You can try it for free for 30 days.