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Innovation Management and Ideation Solutions with SharePoint and Project Server

  • Article

One of the topics that I’ve been discussing often with my customers and partners is innovation management and ideation solutions. This is a hot topic and companies are trying to find new ways to make money, save money, improve processes and increase collaboration with their employees, customers and partners.

These solutions help solve business problems around:

  1. Employee/customer/partner engagement & retention
  2. Generating and surfacing new ideas from “the crowd” (aka crowdsourcing)
  3. Finding the next blockbuster product
  4. Improving existing business processes
  5. Getting constructive feedback
  6. Killer application – driving adoption of collaboration solutions

Some of my recent presentations on driving end user adoption for SharePoint and taking SharePoint to the next level have demonstrated how innovation management solutions fit into the broader Microsoft SharePoint and Project Server landscape. The Microsoft Innovation Management enterprise solutions center provides some great background information and resources for this space. Craig Rode from the Microsoft Manufacturing industry team has some great resources published on innovation solutions available for purchase.

I’ve been looking at innovation management solutions for about 6 months now. In May 2011, my colleague, Chad Gronbach, and I began working with Joe Boggio and 2 partners, Pcubed and DataLan to deliver 2 innovation focused events at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Waltham, MA Those events were so well received by our customers that we have been working to expand the offerings and focus on innovation within the Northeast District.

Chad and I have recently been teaming up with Simon Floyd and additional Microsoft partners. Customers often ask me what the various options are and the discussion usually comes down to one of build vs. buy. Below are the options that I’ve worked most extensively with and encourage you to check out.

Build

1. The innovation portion of the demonstration that Chad and I built for the MTC event in May was literally built in 1 day using out of the box SharePoint and Project Server capabilities including InfoPath forms, workflows and discussion lists. We constructed an InfoPath forms list for submitting corporate “challenges” that then notified people via a workflow to submit and review“responses” during a period of time that the challenge was active for. We also had an “innovation idea exchange” (SharePoint discussion board) where people could submit ideas and give feedback to others. We leveraged the SharePoint rating functionality for getting feedback and sorting on the top ideas. We also used the SharePoint managed metadata service to allow for consistent categorization of topics. Below is a screenshot of the rollup views that we presented on the innovation site home page. If you are new to SharePoint 2010, then I encourage you to review my prior post on making the business case for social computing on SharePoint 2010.

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2. At the SharePoint Conference in October, Simon Floyd presented a session on “Managing Innovation with SharePoint & Project Server 2010”. During this session Simon demonstrated a free innovation solution accelerator that Microsoft is providing “as is” to Microsoft customers and partners to get their solution off the ground with a set of prebuilt SharePoint site templates and webparts – as well as the ability to “promote” an approved idea to a formal project in Project Server. A screenshot of the solution is below. 2014 Update: This solution is now supported, managed, and offered directly by our partner, QuantumPM.

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3. Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) has some innovation focused solution areas and accelerators that can be purchased which significantly shorten the time to develop and deploy them while offering for a high amount of customization and flexibility.

Buy

  1. Capgemini and Spigit have teamed up to offer innovation business, consulting and software solutions based on SharePoint and Project Server.
  2. Pcubed and PTC are also offering innovation business, consulting and software solutions based on SharePoint and Project Server.
  3. SharePoint social computing partners like NewsGator and Neudesic are also solutions that many of my customers evaluate in this space. Their solutions are built on top of the SharePoint platform.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Unfortunately, no. This post was from about 2.5 years ago and I no longer have the SharePoint 2010 samples that I had built out at the time. Sorry.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks for the comments Don. Feel free to use the "email blog author" link above and we can connect and I can share the free "as is" accelerator with you.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    There is a sharepoint based solution called Mazzum under http://mazzum.com
    It has all the feature that you need to setup an Office365 site. www.mazzum.com

  • Anonymous
    November 11, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    July 26, 2012
    Thanks for this solid article, Chris. I have a background in tech strategy and psychology, and was really geeked when I took a look at Spigit's potential. Unfortunately, I haven't yet gotten executives to believe in the value of crowdsourcing and/or directed innovation. So no budget or approval is coming my way to discuss with a vendor. That leaves me in a position of wanting to implement an ideation tool at the department level, show some ROI in practical use for challenges and situations that I know well in my own department. That could help establish a case study and results to share more broadly. Since I don't have budget authority, and no one 'owns' innovation or similar, having an opportunity to spin up something for free, or very small cost, would be helpful to introduce the concepts into a conservative Fortune 100 company. PS - Sure would have been nice if MS bought NewsGator, which improves the value of SP in a dozen ways, including an ideation module.

  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2014
    Is there a link to a working site that you created as mentioned in #1 above?

  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2014
    Too bad, I would also be interested in what you did (but now on SharePoint 2013). I don't wanna integrate (yet) another service for a simple innovation page....sighs

  • Anonymous
    May 20, 2014
    Has anyone done anything like this? I am looking for help and guidance to do something similar to what is described here. Any help greatly appreciated.

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2014
    Pingback from Idea Management (Ideation) In SharePoint - FAQs System

  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2017
    Thanks Chris. Could you share the free "as is" accelerator?. It's a major challenge yet.

    • Anonymous
      October 03, 2017
      Unfortunately it was for SharePoint 2010 and is no longer available. Sorry.