• Idea Capture
• Challenges
• Review and Workflow
• IP Management
• Portfolio Management
• Reports & Measurements
• Decision Support
• Collaboration and Language Support
• Incentive and Recognition
• Profiles

Effective idea capture requires a user interface that is intuitive, integrated, and part of an overall business process.  The forms used to capture must be tailored to the types of ideas and the type of users, i.e., is this a change in the manufacturing process or a new invention disclosure.  Use our Portal Generation Tool to quickly build web portals that mimic your organization's style, colors, and desired functionality.   

Generating unique ideas that solve specific organizational challenges has never been easier or faster.  Innovation campaign wizards allow users to define exactly what type of ideas the company desires and the length of the campaign.  Team definition and review criteria are also included.  The new design component of the Innovator allows ideation portals to be easily set up by configuring flexible web-based modules that are integrated seamlessly into the Innovator Enterprise Innovation Management System.  Portals could be configured based on different departments, different foreign languages, different types of suggestions, or different kinds of customers, and they can all be associated with different workflows, security, and input forms, while still being handled from a single administration point.

Performing timely reviews is one of the most important aspects of an effective innovation management program.  With extensive review committee functions, it has never been easier to manage the entire review process.  Using our specialized business process workflow engine, nearly any review process can be configured, whether it is hierarchical, linear or a combination.  Rules that determine how and when ideas are moved between various review committees help speed the process.  For the reviewer, the dashboard contains the latest information regarding tasks, comments, analysis results, and related attachments.  This information is presented on a single page and helps facilitate a streamlined review process, even allowing for "virtual" reviews to take place.

The control and management of an organization's intellectual property is vital.  With the Innovator, IP Management is a cornerstone to the design and operation of the entire system, and is at the heart of many of our patent-pending functions.  With this module, you attain better portfolio management, easy access by external counsel/experts, external search integration, security/confidentiality throughout entire process, and overall reduction in litigation risk through our proprietary features.  To maintain the state-of-the-art in this area, we employ attorneys in-house who advise on new functionality as well as team with partners to add new outside services to the IP process.  Some of the totally integrated services available include legal safeguarding to create "snapshots" of ideas as they change from simple ideas to potential patent applications, creating a certified record, prior art searching to provide inventors with quick 80-20 rule prior art searches on new concepts, and details to IP professionals, helping to make better informed decisions, and defensive publication to automate the process of publishing key research and innovation, proactively blocking others from IP overreaching.

Minimizing "non-core" innovation.  Ultimately, the constraining element of your innovation business process will be the resources that you can apply to promising new ideas.  With our Portfolio Management module, you'll be able to visually compare promising projects against technical constraints,  marketing constraints, financial constraints, or whatever metrics you currently employ in your organization.

Need to determine the ROI of your Innovation Management process?  Innovator gives you the ability to view your company’s innovation. An executive dashboard allows reports, ranging from individual project to corporate total—and any level in between. Drill down, drill up to get the view you need. Analyze, compare, and sort information.

• Daily, quarterly, and yearly dashboards
• Participation rates
• Innovations by department and location
• Commercialization rates 
• Review committee efficiencies
• Inventor statistics
• Usage rates
• Top innovations and inventors 
• Status and aging statistics  
• Challenge and response metrics
• Task tracking and efficiency
• Incentive and reward metrics
• Collaboration rates

Do you ever wonder if your asking the right people the right questions to effectively decide on ideas in your innovation pipeline?  The fact is that every organization is different and requires different types of decisions to be made regarding different types of ideas.  To complicate matters, most decisions also require that different questions are asked of people with the correct experience, i.e., technical people answering technical questions, financial people answering financial questions.  With Innovator, this is easily administered.  By setting up rules based on a myriad of parameters such as innovation type or status, or a persons department or expertise, ideas are quickly sent and filtered by the correct people using the right criteria.  To make improvements to your decision process, sensitivity analysis can be used to determine which analysis factors have the most impact, so that your decision process continues to become more streamlined and efficient.

Providing feedback and incentives for employees that submit quality ideas has a positive impact on continued innovation and employee morale.  Innovator has made launching and managing an employee incentive program nearly effortless.  It offers a complete solution to create custom point schedules, add unique prizes and gifts, manage employee point exchange requests, and run detailed program reports.  Users of the system will be able to easily review and manage their point totals in the same way that most frequent flier award programs operate.  Users are able to redeem points for prizes of the company's choosing, while managers are informed of key milestone achievements

What if you could find out the most researched topic, the person who is the most innovative, or the person who has the most expertise in electrical component design.  These are all possible with our user profile module.  Employing the 80-20 principle, the Innovator seeks to document as much as possible about the users to increase collaboration and help maintain complete and accurate records on innovation.  With job changes occurring more frequently today, it's possible that you may not know what expertise people in other departments have accumulated in past positions.  By utilizing the Find Expert functionality this all becomes reality.  While this information is extremely helpful, we also realize that collecting it can be difficult.  To this end, we have built a portfolio of tools to make the data collection process more friendly and successful.