As we stand on the brink of a new year, filled with promise and potential, we’re thrilled to unveil our latest software release. This isn’t just an update; it’s a testament to our shared commitment to innovation, growth, and resourcing for a brighter future. As you finalize your plans and set up company-wide resources for a successful 2025, rest assured knowing we’ve got your back.

We’ve meticulously planned and crafted this release, ensuring it embodies the spirit and ambition that defines you—our community—to GO BIG!

This. Is. It. The moment we take a bold step forward, equipped with a range of new features designed to empower and inspire all departments across your org. We’ve poured our hearts into this update, envisioning the countless ways it will help streamline your workflows, spark creativity, and drive success. So, as you embark on this journey into the new year, know that we’re right here with you, cheering you on and developing the tools you need to plan and conquer the brave new challenges that lie ahead. Together, let’s make the new year truly extraordinary!

Introducing Department Idea Box

Introducing a backlog for all! We get it—backlogs can be overwhelming, but they’re also a goldmine of potential progress. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce new features designed to help you tame the beast. With our latest updates, you can transform your backlog into a lean, mean, prioritizing machine. Say goodbye to chaos and hello to clarity as you easily organize, track, and conquer workflow with these new features.

We’ve officially launched a new app under the Idea Box family, “Department Idea Box.” This is great for a single department that needs to collect, prioritize, and move ideas into effective work streams. This is the first Brightidea app that generates a multi-pipeline flow on the backend. Ideas can be routed into one of three streams based on complexity and ROI:

1. “Strategic Project Pipeline” for high-risk, high-cost, high-complexity ideas
2. “Backlog” to park ideas waiting for prioritization
3. “Just Do It” for low-risk, low-cost, low-complexity ideas

In addition to the app rollout, we also have some improvements to our Stage Gate functionality which is tightly coupled with the strategic project work-stream:

• Improved Scoring Tools: A floating gate scorecard has been introduced for more dynamic evaluations. You now have the added ability to edit and update scorecards, ensuring alignment with evolving project needs.
• Streamlined Workflows: Core workflow improvements for greater efficiency. Updates to pipeline setup, now available at the main template configuration level. Adjustments to app step and stage configurations for enhanced template management.
• User Experience Enhancements: Updates to action items, making task management more intuitive.

Streamline Your Flow with Efficiency

In today’s fast-paced world, efficiency is the key to success. Whether you’re managing a team, running a business, or simply trying to stay on top of your personal tasks, streamlining your workflow can make all the difference. That’s why we’re excited to introduce our latest software release, designed to help you achieve just that. With a suite of new features and enhancements, we’re here to transform how you work, making every task smoother, faster, and more intuitive. Let’s dive in and explore how you can streamline your flow with our latest updates:

• Enhanced Duplication: Administrators can choose which elements to replicate when duplicating an initiative. This makes it easy to select between using the default configuration or individually copying specific settings from the selected initiative.
• Copy Project Room: You’ve asked, so we’ve delivered! You can now seamlessly copy Project Rooms, similar to the copy/template creation options available in Whiteboard and Memo.
• Rich Text Editor 3.0 (BETA): We are excited to announce the beta release of the updated Rich Text/HTML widget. This update enhances the user experience by allowing you to configure widgets on site home pages. To try it out, please contact your customer service representative.

Enterprise-Grade System Management

Managing complex global systems can be tricky. Our latest release introduces a suite of enterprise-grade features designed to elevate your system management game. With these new capabilities, you’ll have everything you need to stay organized, efficient, and ahead of the curve.

• Brightidea AI: Has been enhanced with the power of AI for collaborative brainstorming! Our improved AI-powered Whiteboard now allows you to easily generate ideas, create images, and engage with a chatbot. Packed with features, Brightidea AI helps you expand ideas using sticky notes, organize and summarize concepts on your board, correct grammar and spelling, provide summaries, and adjust the tone of your content. As always, administrators have the ability to enable or disable these functionalities for users.
• Improved Label Management: We have extended label editing to View Idea 3.0 and Expertise to give administrators more extensive control over messaging to their users.
• Advanced Timezones: For global teams, we’ve closed the gap to ensure all areas of the site respect time and date formats within the entire platform. Our advanced timezone feature also ensures daylight savings is respected.

Project Room and Whiteboard Upgrades

We’ve enhanced our Project Room and Whiteboard features to make collaboration seamless and intuitive. The Project Room updates help streamline navigation and search, while the Whiteboard updates help your team communicate and customize ideas with precision.

• Project Room UI Updates: We’ve enhanced the left navigation menu with a more streamlined UI. This update provides a more condensed view, including efficient object name editing through double-clicking. Furthermore, we’ve added the ability for users to include external app-specific links (e.g. Google Doc, Box, Jira, etc.)
• Project Room Search: You can now search across all Project Rooms under userhome for faster access to the content you seek.
• Emojis: We have enabled emojis in idea comments and on the Whiteboard canvas. Users can now express their opinions, making it easier for them to support and engage with each other with a vast emoji library.
• Eye-Dropper Tool: We’ve expanded our existing color palette in Whiteboard. With the ability to select a color anywhere on your desktop, our new eye-dropper allows you to select and set colors for all objects, text, and other elements.

Platform Performance Enhancements

We’re committed to ensuring our platform runs as smoothly as possible. That’s why we’ve made significant updates under the hood to boost performance and reliability. These improvements are designed to provide you with a faster, more stable experience so you can focus on what you do best:

• Critical System Upgrades: We’ve significantly updated core components across our platform, delivering noticeable performance, security, and functionality improvements. These upgrades enhance load speeds, bolster overall system stability, and position us to integrate future innovations seamlessly. The result? A more reliable, efficient, and modern platform experience for our customers, ensuring that your work is supported by cutting-edge technology every step of the way.
• File Uploads: Our improved file upload process ensures enhanced scalability, reliability, flexibility, and security behind the scenes, providing a seamless and robust experience for users.
• Text Engine Improvements: We’ve updated the text engine in Whiteboard for better readability, performance, and interactions. To streamline workflows, we have made considerable updates to bullets, text box sizing and functionality, default text options, text links, hotkeys and more!
• Customer Support Tickets: No large release is complete without customer feedback! We’ve resolved 200+ high-priority support tickets through rolling prioritization and execution throughout this cycle.

The much anticipated Winter 2024 release is more than just a set of new features—it’s a reflection of our commitment to empowering your innovation journey. We can’t wait to see how you’ll leverage these tools to GO BIG and achieve even greater success in the dawn of a golden age of innovation & transformation.

Here’s to a year of big ideas, seamless collaboration, and groundbreaking innovations. Let’s make 2025 our most innovative year yet!

GO BIG!
Brightidea team

We’re constantly inspired by the stories our customers bring to the table. In our inaugural season of The Synthesize Podcast, “Just Say Hackathon,” we dove into hackathons through conversations with innovation leaders from companies like Dell, 3M, Amtrak, and more. We’re proud to announce the wrap of season one with eleven impactful episodes related to the art of hackathons! Season one conclusion:

No strangers to innovation, these companies are constantly tackling the whirlwind of global change, from technological breakthroughs to geopolitical shifts.

Season one of The Synthesize Podcast introduces listeners to the impactful practices that drive these companies forward. Hackathons emerged as a pivotal approach for pushing boundaries and cultivating innovation, whether it’s sparking employee ideas, refining a groundbreaking concept, or implementing strategies that withstand the ever-changing market.

We also got to hear firsthand from those driving hackathons within their organizations. We discussed why hackathons are essential to any innovation strategy, how to set up a successful event, and,‌ most importantly, how to measure their success.

Under the tutelage of our esteemed hosts, Matthew Greeley, CEO of Brightidea, and Margaret Kelsey, engagement expert, we’ve wrapped season one and have our sights on bringing season two to life where we’ll dive even deeper into topics that matter most to innovation leaders.

Don’t miss your chance to stay informed and inspired—subscribe to The Synthesize Podcast today:

There is no sugar-coating it: the world is changing faster than ever. Depending on your perspective, this moment represents either the biggest threat or the greatest opportunity of our lifetimes. Embrace the new, and untold riches are up for grabs. Cling to the old for too long, and you may find yourself stuck in neutral, as the others speed past. It’s time look beyond ideas. It’s time to to DRIVE THE PROCESS all the way from insight to productivity and profits. With Brightidea by your side, you won’t just survive this period of disruption—you will accelerate bravely into the future, leaving the competition in the dust.


Introducing Brightidea Innovation Cloud 4.0, with features designed to empower Innovation teams to drive a more structured approach to managing their innovation pipelines. From enhanced collaboration tools to cutting-edge AI capabilities, we’ve got everything you need to put the pedal down and win.

Deep Support for Demanding Innovation Workflows

The Stage Gate process is a proven, linear methodology that helps organizations prioritize, allocate resources, and de-risk projects. With this addition, we’re empowering you to make data-driven decisions and increase your chances of project success.

This core platform update is available, by default, on several apps within our app families to support the diverse use cases. This includes a new app as part of our Idea Box family, Innovation Process, Incubate from Lab, Venture within the Ecosystem family, and lastly, Transform from the Transformation family.

Now Available In These Apps

 
This powerful tool will revolutionize how you manage your projects, from inception to launch. By automating project room creation and enabling seamless scoring against predefined gates, you can now focus on what truly matters – driving large innovative concepts to market.

Features include:

• Customized and Pre-configured App: The mentioned apps have updated core workflows to support the new action items and models a Stage Gate process creating a more efficient build out.
• Stage Action Item: Introduces a new action item that pulls together all the assets and activities teams need to support the phase of the project the concept is currently within, allowing the team to collaboratively work toward the next gate approval.
• Gate Approval Action Item: Customizable scorecard, with the ability for evaluators to complete their evaluation directly in line within the Project Room, tracking progress and managing final scores.
• Customizable Project Room Templates: Ability to set-up a Project Room, per initiative, automatically creating the room on the record. We have generated default project rooms to support the top use cases that can also be used out of the box.
• Connective Tissue Within the Entire Platform: Utilize cutting edge and competitive tools like Whiteboard, Memo, Business Impact tracking, etc.

Core Platform Enhancements for Maximum Efficiency

To help you work smarter, not harder, we’ve introduced several key updates to our platform:

• View Idea 3 for All: After an extended Beta period, we’re rolling out our advanced idea management tool, View Idea 3, to all apps by default. This means richer idea capture, better collaboration, and improved decision-making across your organization. With this rollout we also updated our tag subscription functionality!
• Enhanced Rules Engine: Our upgraded Rules Engine delivers greater flexibility and control over your workflow automation, saving you time and reducing errors.
• Scheduler Improvements: We’ve made it easier to visualize and manage your events with our enhanced Scheduler, including synching the work with front end site design components, like the Phase Widget.
• Quicker Idea Intake: Addition of an enhanced Quick Add to all app solutions for administrators and evaluators to quickly add ideas, bypassing submission form, but capturing key notes, categories, etc.
• Cleared our Backlog: Closed over 200 customer related bugs and issues within this last release cycle.

User Experience and Collaboration Boost

We’re committed to making your experience as seamless and enjoyable as possible. That’s why we’ve introduced:

• Centralized View of all Ideas: End users can now access and view all ideas they have permission to see in one convenient location to better source, track, and find ideas across initiatives.
• Team Size Management: Introduction of hard caps on team size, limiting submission and growth at a specific admin determined size.
• Group Management: Improved UI experience in creating and managing groups and a rollout of the beta feature for group, evaluator assignment.

Foundational Whiteboard Enhancements

Our Whiteboard tool continues to be a core capability to grow, evolve and capture your team’s thinking and processes, in a boundless manner. Some core updates for you include:

• Bi-Directional Syncing: Ensure data consistency between your platform and Whiteboard with our enhanced bi-directional sync, which will update data within your platform and the stickies on your board.
• Updates to our Default Templates: UI updates to all our Brightidea system templates, and reminder, users can customize and set system templates for all users in their innovation platform to utilize.
• Micro Interaction Improvements: Updates to our line width customization, object scaling, and hotkeys all to improve efficiency within the tool.
• Performance Upgrades: Updated our core Whiteboard infrastructure helping with improved speed and performance when working with our core components.

Innovating at the Frontier of Collective and Artificial Intelligence

Our AI capabilities continue to evolve. With the latest version of frontier models, our AI engine is smarter and more powerful than ever, so don’t forget to utilize our core features to ensure your innovation process is more efficient and accelerated.

• Suggested for You: Get customized platform updates and user activity within your Userhome, filtered based on similar activities that you have completed in the tool.
• Brainstorm Brilliantly: Our Whiteboard tool’s AI-powered brainstorming feature helps you generate fresh ideas and explore new possibilities to kickoff a session or power through a stall.
• Idea Acceleration: Our AI can assist you in developing and maturing idea descriptions and details within the submission and View Idea 3 processes.
• Idea Development: Within our Memo tool, use AI as an outside source to help you validate and expound on a business case and/or idea positioning.
• Scout Smarter: Our Scout app uses AI to identify potential vendors and automatically imports them into your pipeline, saving you valuable time.

The Winner’s Circle

As business leaders we must cultivate an “innovation mindset” within our teams and throughout our organizations. Right now you now have unique and deeply-integrated capabilities to support the complex Innovation Processes within your organization. These tools enable you to achieve the essential balance between velocity and control. With the right mindset, the best tools, and an engaged team you can achieve extraordinary things.

So, fire up those engines and take this baby for a test drive. We can’t wait to see the amazing things you will do with BIC4.

Stay bright
Brightidea team

Battling the charter of tech transformation with company mobilization is a constant yo-yo for those in leadership positions. Layered on top of times of uncertainty – looming economic turbulence, upcoming elections, and rapidly accelerating technology, it can feel like the reins are slipping away.

A recent McKinsey article, “How Innovative Companies Leverage Tech to Outperform,” underscores the critical role of innovation currently and dissects the commonalities between companies that are succeeding.

The McKinsey article highlights key takeaways that resonate with our mission at Brightidea:

• Innovation is a strategic imperative, not a luxury. Companies that prioritize innovation during downturns outperform their peers in the long run.
• Companies with strong innovation cultures are more likely to succeed. Organizations with a strong innovation culture scaled the impact of their digital transformations twice as effectively as those with weaker cultures.
• Technology is a game-changer. The right tools can empower your workforce, streamline processes, and maximize the ROI of your innovation efforts, offering more competitive advantages.
• Operational models cannot stay stagnant. Companies unlock the most value from technology when it is applied to innovating their business model rather than focusing on disconnected use cases.

Brightidea Can Help Bring These Insights to Life

Brightidea’s innovation management software goes beyond simply being a platform; it’s a strategic partner in your organization’s innovation journey. Here’s how Brightidea empowers you to act on the insights presented by McKinsey:

Cultivating a Culture of Innovation
Brightidea fosters a culture of innovation by breaking down silos and encouraging participation from everyone in your organization. Our platform provides a central hub for idea submission, making it easy for employees to share their ideas, regardless of their department or level, and engage in their peers’ concepts.

With the Hackathon application, there are even more opportunities to break through the departmental silos and help cross-team and organizational collaboration through the Participants Finder and exploration tool. Participants can register with their expertise and mark if they want to recruit or join teams. We help facilitate conversations within the platform – and through our teams and Slack integrations.

This diverse influx of perspectives and participants fuels a richer innovation pipeline and fosters a sense of ownership within your workforce, the culture of innovation is a foundational brick to the success of a program.

Streamlining the Innovation Pipeline
Gone are the days of scattered ideas and inefficient processes. Brightidea offers a centralized platform for the entire innovation lifecycle. From initial ideation to development and implementation. We work to streamline all collaboration and communication between team members, administrators, and those parts of the evaluation process.

Submitted ideas are properly vetted, refined, and progressed through the proper stages, maximizing their potential for success.

Data-Driven Decision Making
Effective innovation isn’t just about generating great ideas; it’s about identifying and nurturing the ones with the most significant impact. Brightidea empowers you to measure and analyze your innovation efforts. Our platform tracks the progress of ideas, captures feedback, and offers valuable data insights. Ensuring you prioritize the right ideas based on strategic fit, potential impact, and feasibility, ensuring your resources are directed towards the initiatives with the greatest chance of success.

By leveraging Brightidea’s comprehensive capabilities, you can:

• Move Beyond Brainstorming: Brightidea goes beyond the initial spark of inspiration. Our platform facilitates collaboration and refinement, transforming raw ideas into actionable plans.
• Balance Short-Term Wins with Long-Term Bets: Not all innovation is created equal. Brightidea helps you manage a healthy mix of incremental improvements and disruptive, game-changing ideas. Our platform allows you to nurture both types of innovation, ensuring a steady stream of success stories while also positioning yourself for future breakthroughs. 
• Drive Measurable Results: Innovation shouldn’t be a black box. Brightidea empowers you to track the progress of your ideas, measure their impact, and gain valuable insights to continuously improve your innovation efforts.

Embrace Innovation and Secure Your Competitive Edge
In today’s dynamic business landscape, innovation is no longer optional. It is just too important to be left to chance.

It’s the key to unlocking growth potential and securing a competitive edge. By prioritizing innovation, that means you need to prioritize a tech stack that will help you win. By leveraging the power of Brightidea’s innovation management software, you can transform your organization into an engine of creativity, turning groundbreaking ideas into real-world results.

The sun is shining, the days are hotter, and the feeling of Summer Lovin’ is in the air. Here at Brightidea, we’re not just talking about beach volleyball and backyard barbecues (although those sound pretty amazing too). This summer, we’re celebrating that deep kind of love – the love we have for our amazing customers and the incredible ideas you bring to the table.

We’ve been listening closely to your feedback, and we’re thrilled to unveil a wave of exciting, core upgrades and fixes designed to make your Brightidea experience even smoother. From streamlining your core platform to enhancing workflow and initiative management, these enhancements are all about empowering you to capture those brilliant ideas and turn them into reality. So, get ready to dive into some Summer Lovin’ with Brightidea by your side!

Summer Lovin’, Happened So Fast…

We worked to deliver core configuration updates, requested directly from our customers to ensure you are getting the most efficient use out of the platform. This work includes:

• Ability to add groups as evaluators to more nimbly manage action item assignment (CER-26557, CER-26556).
• All initiative exports now have the ability to be scheduled, delivered within a custom time that works for the site administrator (CER-26263).
• Addition of Whiteboard and Memo counts to the user activity report (CER-24739).
• Ability to search for text within your Whiteboard to help with wayfinding and information organization.
• Closed just under 100 customer support tickets since our last release.

Tell Me More, Tell Me More…

The Project Room feature delivers against the need for teams to collaborate in order to augment, track, and better define an idea. With this release we continue to evolve the offering based on direct customer feedback.

• Can now add a team image to the project room to better identify and rally your team on the Project Room goal.
• Ability to sort and filter all of your team’s tasks within the Project Room’s task page (CER-26506).
• When adding a new Whiteboard or Memo to the project room, can generate from system or custom templates.

Ba dum, ba dum, ba dum-dum-dum…

In our Spring release, we launched core updates to our Hackathon app to ensure that you’re delivering a successful event the first time, and every time. With this release, we wanted to add deeper customization to the features your teams have adopted and are asking for.

• Updated our default Project Room template that is spun up for Hackathon teams’ utilizing the tool to brainstorm and mature their idea.
• Added the ability for Hackathon event managers to customize the Project Room template that is used.
• Updated the Phase widget to honor the timezone set by the administrator within System Settings.

But, Oh Those Summer Nights

We hope this summer sizzle of updates empowers you to turn up the heat on innovation within your organization. We’re excited to see the amazing things you create with Brightidea by your side.

Stay bright,

Your friends at Brightidea

Spring Ahead With Hackathon 4

As winter relinquishes its icy grip, we observe with delight, as new blossoms and life break through the snow. Every year at this time we rejoice in this cycle or rebirth and rejuvenation. If innovation were a season, it would definitely be Spring.

This release, we look to harness that feeling of anew, and bring to you several platform wide updates, as well as a focus on our Brightidea Hackathon solution.

This past year, our Hackathon solution has empowered companies, and we have seen an exponential growth in its utilization. We see one new event launched every four days, with more than 150,000 sessions around the world.

Now, we’re thrilled to unveil a refreshed offering designed to streamline your process, boost engagement, and unlock even greater potential, plus some goodies within our core configurations.

Our Expert Coaches Guide You from Start to Finish

Our team dove deep into our Hackathon offering, developing an enhanced point of view around running a successful, world class Hackathon. Through external research and customer insights, we have developed new assets and guides for our clients to use as a framework for success.

• New and improved Hackathon playbook, which you can find within our apps pillar in the product as well as our updated Knowledge Base Article.
• A detailed Hackathon wiki offering best practices and key activities needed to drive external or internal Hackathons.
• Updated engagement structure for pulling the Professional Services team into the event to help advise, collaborate, or guide your teams.

Self-Guided Participant Onboarding

Team building and making the right connections can unlock not only the success of a project, but also help scale the event across the organization. Some critical updates:

• Created an in-depth onboarding flow that guides the user through the event registration, surfacing the most valuable tools to them based on their use case. This includes access to Project Room, teammate search, etc.
• Created a holistic participant page where users can search and recruit teammates by expertise, certifications, availability, etc.
• Enhanced application process lets participants apply to specific teams, and existing members can accept, reject and message those prospects.

Custom Evaluator Ordering and Navigation

Hackathon judges will often be executive, c-suite members or external partners who do not regularly login to system, which means administrators are carrying the burden of logging them in, guiding them to the right action item, and monitoring for completion. Well, we heard you and we now have updated features to help.

• Admins can manually update the order of projects, which will be reflected on all action item manage and completion pages.
• Introduced the ability to send an ad hoc email to the evaluators to quickly remind them of the action item location and actions they may need to take.
• Added main navigation links to direct judges to their open action items. Also have the ability for admins to copy the link and send directly to the evaluators.

Tools & Techniques for Admins

Forget time-consuming configuration. Our platform is now prepped to launch a successful Hackathon out of the box.

• Updated the default configuration. This includes more direct statuses, a recommended template for the use of categories, and more defined steps and stages to allude to multiple rounds of evaluations.
• Experience a streamlined event-focused design with our new Hackathon event site view. Inspired by our intuitive Memo and Idea Box interfaces, it ensures participants and evaluators get straight to the action, ideal for departmental Hackathons with defined scope and event phases.
• Enabled View Idea 3 as the default record view for some of our most utilized apps; Idea Box, Memo, Gig, Hackathon.

Additional Brightidea Innovation Cloud Updates

Our team has worked diligently in bringing upgrades across the platform to ease usability across our entire toolset. This includes:

• Updates to our submission form, including the ability to invite users to register directly from the teammate field, as well as the ability to add a Whiteboard directly onto your submission.
• Multiple Project Room updates to support management of your teams and ideas, including automating the creation via the rules engine.
• Continuous improvement to our Rich Text/HTML 2.0 widget, including the support of HTML5 tags.

Our Work Continues…

In this ever-evolving landscape of innovation, we wish you continued growth and the realization of your full potential.

And just know, we are right there with you, already hard at work synthesizing even more exciting features for the Summer and Fall releases, so stay tuned. We can’t wait to share what’s next on the horizon, just through the clouds.

Stay Bright,
The Brightidea team

As the year draws to a close, a sense of quiet reflection settles over us. We’ve witnessed moments of immense hardship – technological shifts, social fractures, and economic uncertainties that tested our resilience.

Yet, amidst these trials, and during the holiday season, we ground ourselves in tradition, looking to reconnect with those we love. So, to our cherished customers and friends, we offer this handful of updates. May it bring a touch of ease to your days and a spark of joy to your hearts.

Togetherness: Team Updates for You and Them

It’s always better to have teammates when working toward goals, and well, we made sure to bring that over to our software with two new updates to our team submission capabilities.

The first update is teams can help brand their submissions with the new team name feature. When submitting or editing a team, those included can create a team name to be associated with the submission. This will then be displayed on the record or any preview of the record, as well as any exports for the initiative. (CER-16795)

The second is we have expanded the team size limit we have in our Hackathon app to all offerings. Now admins can set a specific limit to the count of people on a single submission. (CER-18804)

Connection: Project Room Continues to Evolve

Within our Fall 2023 release, we gave you Project Room. And we are seeing customers rapidly adopt this new tool to help drive collaboration and accountability within their teams. In ensuring teams have the right content and information all in one place we have added some exciting updates.

We brought the file management capabilities within Team Workspace over to our Project Room capabilities. Upload all of your files directly into the room to keep teammates and reference materials updated. (CER-26286)

We also improved the task functionality. Now you can add multiple ‘tasks’ pages to a single Project Room, mapping tasks to specific milestones throughout the project’s life cycle. And, in addition to user assignment, status, and date details per task, you can now add comments, allowing more async updates and the ability to track progress with more granularity. (CER-18676)

Tidying Up: Collaboration Just Keeps Getting Easier

Since our Whiteboard launch we have now seen more and more teams gather and bring their pipeline’s ideas into a more open, collaborative space.

To help your teams continue on the progress you will see several updates from us.

• Our smart matrix, which comes with several templated x- and y-axis labels, now allows users to input a custom field so you can rank ideas on any variables needed. (Dare we say naughty vs nice) (CER-24764)
• Whiteboards can now be added directly to a Record to help supplement and enhance your concepts. (CER-26248)
• You can now add, edit, and remove links to any objects within the board. And remember, you can also copy a link to a direct location within the board to help teammates find relevant content. (CER-25392, CER-24735)
• Simplified and updated toolbars and menu dropdowns to help you more efficiently access key, differentiating tools, such as our AI integration and pipeline connectivity.

Here’s to a brilliant 2024…

We have good reasons to be optimistic about the coming year. Ceasefires glimmer on the horizon, economies show resilience and a sense of renewed civility is afoot. One thing is for certain though, change is coming; fueled by a relentless tide of technological progress.

We hope you’re setting ambitious goals for yourself and drafting more targeted and impactful objectives for your teams. We’re here to be your partner in progress, helping you unlock maximum value for your organization.

Brightidea’s future is brimming with excitement. We’re planning some powerful updates, key fixes, and groundbreaking capabilities that we hope will amaze and astound you. But before we dive into the new year, a word of immense gratitude. To our customers, friends, colleagues, and collaborators: you are the heart of Brightidea. Your faith and trust fuel our mission to save the world with the power of bright ideas. Thank you.

Until we meet again, stay bright, stay curious, and may the best ideas win.

The Brightidea Team

Since the release of Whiteboard in the fall of 2021, we have watched the evolution of how clients are using the tool. Our Whiteboard tool captures the necessity of having all your activity in one place, integrated directly with your platform to better prioritize, rank, and collaborate in a meaningful way.

Feature updates include:

• Integrated prioritization: You can now send unlimited ideas from your pipeline directly into either a stacks or stickies format. Backlog management has never been more flexible to support your team.
• Role accountability: Within our stacks feature, you can now assign actions directly to teammates to better organize and check on progress.
• Productivity tools: Addition of text based tables, that allow you the ability to export to excel. As well as image cropping capabilities.

Project Room is a new feature that will be enabled for all systems. This robust enhancement is an evolution of our existing Team Workspace capabilities and solves the need to augment, track, and better define an idea within your pipeline.

Project Room key features include:

• Team building: Invite team members across the organization to participate and collaborate with.
• Consolidate assets across the platform: Ability to add Business Impact, Whiteboards, Memos, Ideas, and external links all within the space.
• Project management and task tracking: Manage your projects and action items with ease. Within the task feature you can assign tasks to team members, track due dates, and monitor progress through status updates.

New with this release is an AI integration within our Scout app. This allows admins to source ideas through AI and inject those responses directly into their pipeline to then monitor and track, ensuring teams are capturing all current startups and competitors in their market.

And reminder, with our previous release, we have key areas where AI is already within the platform including AI assist within the idea submission process, image generation, and in Whiteboard throughout team collaborative sessions.

Innovation within teams, organizations, and entire industries is a responsibility and honor to be shared by all. We aim to empower teams to stave off disruption and meet the opportunities that are realized through recent accelerations. It is everyone’s responsibility to drive forward, to push through the fear and the complexity. Because, simply stated, innovation is too important to be left to chance.

Stay Bright,
Brightidea team

Shred the Waves of Disruption

It looks like 2023 is shaping up to be an Endless Summer of disruption. In the past few months, we have seen world-shaking announcements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Healthcare, Energy, and Fintech/Crypto. And this is just a few of the 10 Disruptive Waves we highlighted for organizations to monitor back in 2018.

Forward-thinking innovation leaders are realizing that, “This is Our Time.” The world is catching up to what they’ve known all along – that technology continues to surge forward and is changing markets, customer behaviors, and expanding what’s possible.

To that end, this release is designed with our customers’ needs at the forefront. We’ve been hard at work, striving to provide you with the tools you need to not just ride, but master, the waves of disruption, because innovation is too important to be left to chance.

Better Tools to Help You Manage Your Pipeline

To help manage the surf, our team spent critical time and energy working on upgrading some of our core capabilities. These enhancements and updates span across our entire platform and include:

• In the “Update Assignees…”modal, when removing evaluators that have open or completed action items, average scores will now be updated to reflect changes and action items will show as canceled, instead of deleted.
• Updates to the designs for the edit and configuration modals for action items to better surface critical data.
• An enhanced rule engine UI in addition to several new rule capabilities and conditions including, but not limited to, creating a new team workspace to events triggered from the stage the idea is in.
• Ability to quickly duplicate steps allowing you to copy action item assignees, templates, due dates, notifications, and evaluation results. (CER25995) & (CER26092)
• The ability to export site and system setting logs to track changes made by users and the date the changes were made.

Chips Voting: Support for Multiple Rounds

Chips and simple voting are great tools to engage your employee base, gather feedback, and track idea progress.

We have enhanced voting to allow for more of an iterative, continuous workflow. As an example, admins can now do a reset, which will reallocate the votes back to employees and remove all chips or votes from the individual records. When doing this, the system will retain a history of the original allocation, which will be available within the voting export.

This allows teams to consistently re-poll on end-user feedback, while not losing the historical context. (CER24886) & (CER19019)

AI: Even More Ways to Brainstorm & Develop Ideas

Brightidea is no stranger to AI and we have been utilizing the tech to fuel our Userhome recommendation engine and our Top Ideas meritology. And more recently, back in our fall release, we integrated OpenAI within our memo solution.

And we have not stopped yet. This release we are excited to continue to reveal opportunities to ensure that innovation has the best chance to thrive, using AI to enhance several key areas within our platform.

• AI is now embedded in the submission form. Use it to help generate a description right from your title, build out the maturity of your idea, update grammar and spelling, and add a summary.
• Utilize the companion AI within Whiteboard, by providing a specific prompt and task, then watch the ideas generate into stickies for your team to build off, interact with, score, and more.
• And finally, we now have the ability to surface AI-generated images in the platform in common areas from the initiative homepage to idea record images. (CER24937)

Whiteboard: Create Custom Templates, Sharing, and Export Updates

Well, you asked, we delivered. We enhanced several key areas of the Whiteboard platform to help you more efficiently work, navigate and share content, including:

• You can now create and share custom templates with teammates across your platform. (CER24729) & (CER25300)
• Ability to export content to PNG or PDF.
• Send a link to a specific object for easier wayfinding. (CER24736) & (CER24792)
• Zoom options to fit all content within the screen and navigate throughout your board.

Fun fact: the surfer featured in the image at the top of this post is actually our Product Lead for Whiteboard, thanks Miguel!

A Few More Odds and Ends…

Additional tools and capabilities we don’t want to leave out include:

• Continued work against View Idea 3.0, to update the functionality of our record view across all applications.
• Incremental updates to the people pillar and licenses pages, surfacing all license types and last logins.
• And finally, we closed nearly 100 bugs in our backlog stretching across our entire platform working on anything from image and video upload enhancements to 508 compliance work.

Stay Balanced and Ready

Right now, in a time of fast-paced change and rapid technological advancements, those that can harness the power of innovation will end up on top. As these disruptive waves arrive, we, at Brightidea, will do everything we can to ensure you and your teams are prepared and ready.

Surfs up and stay bright,
Brightidea team

In Innovation We Trust

A recent poll conducted by Gallup in 2022 found that trust in institutions is at an all-time low, but that might not come as a surprise to most given recent headlines around bank failures, economic headwinds and political gridlock. However, there is one institution missing from the Gallup findings which time and time again has led us out of darkness when our backs were against the wall, and that my friends is the institution of innovation. While trust may indeed be eroding in conventional institutions, our best option is to put our shoulders into what we know will not let us down and trust in our ability to innovate.

Our Spring Release is focused on new features, enhancements and bug fixes to help our customers be more efficient than ever while also bolstering the ability to ideate, innovate and track and measure the ROI of your programs.

Custom Idea Code Prefix

You can now customize your idea code at both the system level and the site/initiative level for better flexibility and organization when managing multiple pipelines. This unlocks new functionality to help users:

• Easily filter ideas at the system list view by custom idea codes.
• Search for ideas  more efficiently with custom prefixes by initiatives.
• Quickly surface ideas in URL strings by typing in custom code prefix.
• Build reporting around initiatives and ideas that have the most potential, impact and ROI.

We are pleased to be bringing this customer request to the platform.

To learn more about how to customize your idea codes, check out our knowledge base article.

Idea Submission Form

We are thrilled to be addressing some common customer requests to upgrade the idea submission form. These upgrades will allow innovation managers more access to data and deeper customization of the submission form.

• Idea submission form export options have been enhanced with secondary options for “Include Development fields,” and “Include hidden submission form questions.”
• Added a “Linked Submissions” field to the submission form, so that submitters can link related ideas, right at time of submission.

Learn more about how to customize your submission form and export your submission data via our knowledge base article.

Brightidea Jira Integration 3.1

The Brightidea Jira Integration has been updated to make it easier than ever to create or link ideas directly from Brightidea to Jira, groom your backlogs and provide seamless transparency between each platform.

• Added Jira widget to View Idea 3.0 for transparency and configuration.
• Added custom Jira field when ideas are sent to Jira from Brightidea that contains a link back to the original idea within Brightidea.
• Upgraded to Jira Oauth 2.0 for a 2-click authentication to connect Brightidea Innovation Cloud to your Jira Cloud instance.

Pro-Tip: Reverse Backlog Integration
Hey Jira admins, is your backlog getting out of control? Did you know you can automate deep backlog collection from Jira > Brightidea? All you need to do is configure your Jira backlog to submit tickets or incidents to your Brightidea initiatives via status automation for better prioritization, evaluation and grooming of your deep backlog.

These enhancements to the Brightidea Jira integration make it easier than ever to monitor progress and report on impact and ROI from ideation > execution.

Learn more about the Brightidea Jira integration from our knowledge base article.

Whiteboard Updates

We are excited to say that we have also addressed several customer requests for upgrades, enhancements and new features for Whiteboards.

• Improved ability to size and scale Stacks.
• Now text boxes will retain the properties of the last text box that was added or edited and text that is copied and pasted into a text box will also retain original formatting.
• Added zoom to fit all contents button to easily view all contents within a Whiteboard.

Learn more about all of the new Whiteboard capabilities in our knowledge base article.

Brightidea Memo

This release includes updates to Brightidea Memo to make it easier than ever to start Working Backwards and develop your investment ready innovation bets.

• Added advanced AI prompts to the Memo document editor dropdown to; complete your next sentence, answer a question, or reword your content.
• Enhanced team site design and left rail to help drive top actions and JTBD.
• Simplified create memo experience to surface templates and availability of all three editors.

The feature updates to Brightidea Memo make creating and reviewing memos easier and more efficient than ever before. With improved integration, visual representations, and flexibility, you’ll be able to work more effectively with your team and get more done in less time. Plus, enhanced third-party linking and email notifications make it even simpler to collaborate and stay on top of things.

Learn everything about Brightidea Memo in our knowledge base article.

A few more items to mention…

We have addressed several bugs including; Slack integration issues for initial authentication, rich text widget editor improvements. We also added the ability for Administrators to remove evaluators from the Step Configuration screen. We have also continued to work on global 508 compliance across the Brightidea platform.

Trust in innovation yields outsized returns for your businesses.

Let’s not allow our companies to become the next Gallup Poll, and place our trust in our ability to innovate effectively. We are here to partner with your teams to deliver products and services that will help you ideate, manage your backlogs, seek truth about ideas, place big bets, execute on those opportunities, track ROI and ultimately innovate better than your competitors can.

After all, your competitors are probably listening to conventional wisdom and taking austerity measures to cut spending on innovation, making now the time to double down on expanding your moat and leave them in the dust. But don’t just take our word for it, check out our recent blog covering findings from McKinsey and Company that found that companies that invested in innovation during economic uncertainty achieved a +30% CAGR above their peers that did not.

As Winston Churchill once said, “Never waste a good crisis!”

Stay bright,
Brightidea