ReadWriteEnterprise

Ron Shulkin, VP of the Americas at CogniStreamer, recently wrote a blog post titled "Trust me: You do NOT want to go through your company's idea list manually." Shulkin makes the case against using a basic electronic idea box for ideation, or shoehorning ideas into existing tools, instead of an application dedicated to managing ideas.

"Without a proper mechanism for automatic idea promotion, someone is going to end up with a thousand ideas on their desk and have to filter them manually," Shulkin writes. "They'll have to read them all, sort through them, put them into categories, combine similar ones, somehow score them, rank them and decide which ones are the best." The result is that the person in charge of filtering through all these ideas won't be able to do a very good job, good ideas won't be implemented and people will be discouraged from submitting ideas.

How do you gather ideas at work? Are you using an idea management platform, dropping ideas into a box, or dealing with it all through e-mail or a forum?

Companies such as Dell and Starbucks have created public facing websites for gathering ideas from customers. These two examples are powered by Salesforce.com's idea management module, but there are many other options. Facebook is an increasingly popular place for people to interact with companies, so it's a great place collaborate with your customers on their ideas. Spigit just launched its idea management app for Facebook today, but there are others.

Today, enterprise social software vendors are in a position of having to both differentiate products in a crowded market and make the business case for social in the enterprise. "Process" has become a mantra for companies trying to make the case for a particular solution, and innovation management software is not immune from this tendency.

This week Spigit, a leading innovation management vendor, announced its new product SpigitFusion. SpigitFusion emphasizes decision making and - you guessed it - process.

Last November, another leading innovation management vendor, BrightIdea, made a similar case when it launched its Innovation Suite.

Dice asked the participants at Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara an interesting question: what can you do with enterprise 2.0 tools today that you couldn't do a year ago? Listening to the responses, three themes surface: adoption, awareness and integration. Much of the improvement we've seen in the past year comes not from new tools, but a better awareness of the tools and more people actually using them. The biggest technological change in the past year seems to be more integration between various tools.