Things are looking up.
AI has changed the economics of execution overnight, and innovation teams are cashing in. As execution gets cheaper, the value of a great idea keeps climbing, and so does the value of the people who know how to find one.
When anyone can generate a business case or prototype in seconds, the advantage shifts upstream to knowing which ideas are worth chasing in the first place. That’s always been the job of an innovation team, and it’s why your stock is rising. When it becomes easier and easier to build things, the real work shifts to figuring out what’s worth building, and which ideas are worth investment.
That’s why we’re introducing Brightidea Innovation Cloud 6, built to help organizations discover better ideas, evaluate them with greater confidence, and move them into action faster than ever before. The Fall 2026 Release is the first major milestone in that vision, delivering new capabilities across Idea Box, Program, Ecosystem, and Transformation, giving innovation teams more ways to uncover opportunities, accelerate execution, and create measurable business impact.
Finding the best idea matters more than ever.
When anyone can generate a plan or a prototype in seconds, the ideas sitting in your backlog become your real differentiator. In the age of AI, how you manage that backlog matters more than ever. Innovation Cloud 6 continues our investment in Idea Box by making it easier for employees to contribute ideas and simpler for administrators to manage engagement across their organization It’s an innovation platform even your CFO can love, with the precision to back it up.
- Admin and participant views, now in Idea Box. The streamlined admin/participant toggle already used on hackathon and event sites is now available for Departmental Idea Box. Admins get the full management view while participants see a simpler, focused one. No extra configuration required.
- Brightidea, now inside Microsoft Teams. Submitting and browsing ideas no longer requires a trip to your Brightidea site. Employees can now participate in your innovation program directly from Teams, because ideas can happen anywhere.
- Assign action items to the right person, automatically. Action items can now be dynamically routed to idea owners or to users set in User Selection fields. This makes it even easier to streamline and automate complex workflows. Once custom features, we’ve enhanced their capabilities and made them available to all customers.
Admin and participant views, now in Idea Box.
Want to learn more about Idea Box? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager today to learn more about these capabilities.
Powering your next breakthrough event.
Innovation happens in many formats: hackathons, innovation challenges, sprints, and other time-boxed programs designed to generate momentum around a specific goal. Innovation Cloud 6 continues to invest in Program as an essential part of your innovation strategy, helping organizations launch, manage, and measure high-impact events of every kind.
Hackathons are one of the most popular ways teams put Program to work, and this release focuses on removing friction from that experience, so organizers can spend less time on setup and more time on the event itself.
- Your hackathon, its own site. Search (⌘+K), navigation, and recently viewed now stay inside your event. Participants see your hackathon and nothing else, and stay focused on building the next best thing.
- Lock the fields that matter. Choose which submission fields participants can no longer edit after submission, while admins and moderators keep full access. Your judging record stays intact once the event is underway.
- Take a pulse check at any point in your event. Build a survey with the fields you need, then deploy it as a timed email, a registration trigger, or a shareable link. One builder, every moment of your event.
Your hackathon, its own site.
Interested in running a Hackathon? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager to learn more about our Hackathon solution.
Keep your network moving as fast as the world around it.
The world outside your organization moves fast, new competitors, new funding, new products launching every week. Scout puts you ahead of it. Instead of waiting on submissions to trickle in, describe what you're looking for, and Scout's AI does the research for you, surfacing real, sourced companies in seconds.
- Research you can actually trust. Scout now runs on our latest model with live web search enabled, finding significantly more companies per search with fully sourced, verifiable results, not just what the model happened to remember. Where results used to be sparse and unverifiable, they're now comprehensive and backed by real, checkable sources.
- From a single prompt to full pipeline. No more manual entry, one company at a time. Describe what you're looking for, and Scout's AI researches an entire batch of matching companies and populates them directly into your pipeline in seconds.
- Richer company profiles. Every company now comes with a fuller picture: headquarters, company size, a technology summary, target use cases, and a stage-evaluation progress bar, all populated directly on the record without leaving the platform.
Research you can actually trust.
Curious what's next for Ecosystem? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager today to learn more about these capabilities.
Change has to start somewhere.
You're the one your organization entrusts to bring the change. Brightidea Transformation gives you one platform to source, test, and prioritize the highest-potential ideas, then track their outcome with confidence through a stage-gate pipeline that moves ideas through defined gates as they mature. This release makes that pipeline simpler to run day to day, so you can drive a company-wide culture of innovation and always know what's working and what isn't.
That same model is exactly what AI transformation teams need right now. Every organization is spending on AI. Few are tracking the return. Transformation gives you a way to backlog those initiatives, evaluate them against clear targets, and measure the business impact against what you actually set out to achieve, not just activity for its own sake.
- Recurring action items. Steps can now be set to periodically re-trigger action items, ideal for long-running, continuous pipelines where ideas need scheduled re-evaluation, or a nudge for contributors to keep their information current.
- Collapsible steps and stages. Long and complex pipelines just got easier to navigate. Individual steps and entire stages can now be collapsed down to a thin bar, so teams managing complex, multi-gate pipelines can focus on what's active without the horizontal scroll.
- Auto-research right inside Project Room. When a project room is created, Brightidea kicks off AI research agents behind the scenes, surfacing competitive context, IP considerations, and how the idea fits your existing roadmap. All delivered right into the idea's Project Room.
- More flexibility in how you define value. As your backlog grows, precision matters. Benefit types can now be entered by everyday users as open text, matching the flexibility already available for costs. Now both can be set at the system level or customized per initiative, so the value you're tracking actually reflects what matters to your program.
Recurring action items.
Curious how Transformation fits into your program? Reach out to your Customer Success Manager to learn more.
The only innovation platform your CFO could ever love.
These are heady times for corporate innovation teams. AI is disrupting everything, and we're here to help you make sense of it. We work hard so you don't have to figure it out alone. Every breakthrough still starts with people: the admins configuring the details, the employees submitting the ideas, and the customers we're committed to serving well.
That's what Brightidea Innovation Cloud 6 gives you: a complete, end-to-end, integrated innovation platform, not a fragmented set of tools bolted onto the rest of your stack. It's an auditable ledger from idea to funded project to dollars realized, giving your CFO the rock-solid foundation to become a strategic partner in your innovation portfolio, right alongside your Chief Innovation Officer. The Fall 2026 Release brings new capabilities across Idea Box, Program, Ecosystem, and Transformation, all running on that same platform to drive your innovation portfolio forward. Explore everything that's new, and contact us to start taking advantage of the latest capabilities.
Stay bright,
The Brightidea Team
