Clarity on PLM

I had the chance to talk with … the team at Brightidea about their products to generate, manage, track, and prioritize innovative ideas. Brightidea is helping companies leverage social computing technologies for innovation with a suite of solutions to drive innovation and foster the resulting ideas through the innovation pipeline. I was impressed with a number of aspects of the solution, but perhaps the most surprising observation was the solution is “enterprise aware.” That is my term, not theirs, and not something that they specifically pointed out. But in an area where I see a lot of light-weight “solutions” being built internally or quickly rushed to market, it was refreshing to see that Brightidea developed their solution to address the complexities of the enterprise. It was also nice to see that they spent quite a bit of time understanding the process by which ideas turn into winning products instead of just developing a portal and a database.

My Views on “Idea Management” Software

Put simply, Brightidea is one of a number of “idea management” vendors. I am not a big fan of that term because I think it understates the importance of what some of these companies are doing. They are not simply “managing” information or acting as an online suggestion box. They are helping companies drive innovation in targeted areas and nurture the ideas in a social setting to help them mature. That, in  my opinion, is much more than “idea management.” Moreover, the solutions that I think are adding the most value are not just ones that help gather ideas, but those that help companies determine which ones to pursue. As one manufacturer I spoke with explained getting a lot of ideas isn’t the problem, it’s filtering through all of the ideas to find the good ones. Managing ideas is boring (although it has to be done). On the other hand, using social and collaborative technologies to incubate  ideas and drive further discussion to help raise the best ideas to the top and give them a jump start in product development is compelling.

What Does Brightidea Do?

OK, with my diatribe over, let’s turn back to Brightidea specifically. I particularly liked the analogy that Vincent Carbone, Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Brightidea, offered me. He explained that what they do is similar to what Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems do to manages leads. But instead of leads, they manage ideas. He points out that a sales lead isn’t worth much at first but could turn into a multi-million dollar deal. CRM systems offer lots of management capabilities, pipeline reports, etc. for leads. He says that Brightidea gives executives what they have for leads in CRM but for their ideas, including dashboards to observe/optimize innovation. I like the analogy because one of the big challenges companies face with sales leads isn’t getting a lot of them, it’s picking out the good ones to pursue through a process of lead qualification. CRM also recognizes that leads go through a lifecycle, starting small and gaining value over time as they are nurtured – or fizzling out and becoming a part of the historical record for later use. I may be taking his analogy too far, but to me it speaks volumes about their understanding of the nature of ideas.

What do they Offer?

The offering from Brightidea is the Brightidea Innovation Suite. The solution consists of three primary parts:

• Webstorm is an online solution used to collect and drive innovation. It offers capabilities to prompt, post, and discuss innovation ideas.
• Switchboard is used to prioritize, collaborate, and score ideas. It provides the ability to turn ideas into product proposals to take to the next step.
• Pipeline is the execution piece. It includes “social project management” and helps track milestones, stages, gates, and provides visibility to projects.

The suite provides a broad array of capabilities, although I am sure that some companies choose to integrate to existing tools for some of the processes covered. Brightidea demonstrated a lot of ability to customize the Webstorm sites. Each individual site can be set up appropriately to fit the social environment and match the company culture. As they explained, each Webstorm can look completely different. The innovation sessions can be directed by some upfront ideas to get them started in the right direction. They can also support ad-hoc webstorms using a button that says “run your own webstorm.” All of the ideas stay in the database, and people can search on them.

What surprised me most, as I mentioned earlier, is the ability to fit into the enterprise. The software can have multiple sites by location or can be shared across business units, geographies, product lines, business units, or functional areas. Those sites can be rolled up to higher levels based on permissions. To me, it looks like a model that is ready for the enterprise.

Who do they Work With?

So who should consider Brightidea? The solution supports multiple industries and is in use by companies both large and small. The Brightidea website lists a host of companies across industries. It doesn’t appear to have any limitations. Some examples they gave in our discussion included:

• R&D people using it
• A pharmaceutical company using it for chemical reactions
• A consumer packaged goods company putting in new names for products

In fact, I used the solution when I acted as master of ceremonies for Aberdeen Group‘s Leadership in Product Development Summit and the solution fit our process well. Unfortunately, I have to admit, we didn’t put enough of our own effort into it to get the most value out of the solution. But the potential was clear, the site was nicely developed, and it was easy enough to work with.

Brightidea also has a partner strategy. For example, HP is a global reseller. They are also including Brightidea inside other software solutions. The examples we discussed were Planview (Product Portfolio Management, PPM) and Rally Software (Application Lifecycle Management, ALM, Agile). In addition, they discussed a strategy to partner with specialty consulting firms to tailor the solution to specific industries.

So that’s what I hear from Brightidea, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them? I have talked with others about this as well, including a view into the idea management application Colgate partnered on with SAP. Who else should I talk to in this space?

What I learned this week … came after reflecting on this video on social computing in PLM I ran across on PTC’s website. I spent a significant amount of my time and energy last year trying to understand the implications of the social networking explosion on product innovation, product development, and engineering. It was interesting to listen to the podcast with the benefit of time moving on a bit to reassess the situation and see what will likely happen in 2011. So what happens next?

Brief Background and Views

Take a look at the video, but my viewpoint in a nutshell is:

• Social networking and social media have ramped up significantly in our personal lives (Facebook, YouTube, etc.)
• Social computing is continuing to gain ground in work environments and applications (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.)
• Product innovation is a team sport (inherently requiring collaboration and cross-functional participation)
• Facebook and similar tools aren’t appropriate for new product development (NPD), but the concepts are (see Facebook fail post)
• The content for the social interaction around product development and engineering is the product (making it a natural to integrate it with PLM)
• Early adopters are on the move and gaining benefits (see early results from the Spike research I worked on with Kalypso)

My Crystal Ball Says 2011 Will Bring…

First, I don’t have a crystal ball and I can’t see the future. All I can do is tell you that this is one of the most obvious directions companies will take. This is as close to a “no-brainer” as they come. I do believe that social computing is happening in product innovation and NPD and will continue to expand. The tie to product data is also intuitive to me, although it will take more time and work. So here are my thoughts:

• Collaboration – This will happen sooner rather than later, it is the proverbial “low hanging fruit.” Companies will leverage generalized applications like Microsoft SharePoint, as well as specialty applications like Vuuch. The PLM vendors are actively working here as well, including PTC with SocialLink and Dassault Systemes with SwYm, and Siemens PLM. Integration to product data and existing PLM process will take longer, but the direction has been set. With so many companies still trying to get the basics in place (let’s face it, there are a lot of product data management (PDM) projects still in the works to put the foundation in place) I don’t think that this will cross into the majority this year, but there will be a lot of projects going on.
• Discovery - Finding ideas, people, and information internally is coming. While collaboration is typically within the known product development or engineering team, discovery extends this to a broader group. I think we will see progress on this in 2011. This can start relatively easy with discussion groups and innovation portals. I see a lot of companies experimenting with this. I believe a lot of this will be internally focused, however, which doesn’t stretch business models or existing processes but enhances them.
• Product Knowledge Management -This is an interesting one, and I think it will take longer. The promise here is not only to collaborate and discover, but to capture that interaction for future reference. This requires integrating the interactions back into the product record and storing them. The value is there, but it has to be done in a coordinated, integrated fashion so will take longer (in my opinion).
• Community, VOC, New IP -Developing external communities and gathering ideas from the outside is something I have always said will take longer. I am rethinking that. It requires people to think differently and develop new business models. But I have seen innovative companies get behind this.  For example, Kimberly-Clark talks about an innovative program in this interview. My opinion has changed as I view this as a standalone initiative. Full integration to innovation processes and NPD (and particularly engineering) will likely take longer, but a good idea that doesn’t require a huge investment is not going to wait in an innovative company. I see vendors like Brightidea, Congistreamer, Imaginatik, Spigit, and a host of others making an impact here in addition to the traditional companies.

Implications for Manufacturers

Things are happening. The world is changing the way we communicate, and the leaders will find a way to be more innovative and drive higher levels of profitability. Innovation has started and will continue. When? That is the big question. My crystal ball only works backwards (researching what has already happened). But I think we will see a lot of progress this year. Check back with me in 2012 when my crystal ball (aka rearview mirror) is working.

So those are my thoughts for 2011, I hope you found it interesting. Let me know what you think, or more importantly what you are planning to do about it!

I had the chance to talk with … SAP and their customer Colgate in June, and learned that they have been hard at work improving the way manufacturers innovate. I was attending an SAP customer event on PLM to get updated on the progress of SAP’s PLM efforts. SAP continued to showcase their new PLM interfaces (now including Recipe Management for the process industries). But the thing that caught my attention most was a presentation on a newly co-developed solution for product innovation codenamed “Edison.” While this isn’t a formal SAP product as of yet, it shows some real promise on how companies can use social computing to drive innovation.

Note: Hopefully this wasn’t the only thing I learned in June, but things have certainly busy and I am behind in sharing!

What they are Doing

The solution, presented jointly by SAP and Colgate, is labeled as an “idea management” solution. To me that description falls a bit short of what they have developed. The solution handles a broad range of the innovation process, including:

• Idea Solicitation – to help target innovation as opposed to an all purpose suggestion box
• Idea Submission – to capture ideas from participants, including any supporting media they choose to submit
• Review and Processing – to help companies find the ideas they want to focus on, including search, filtering, sorting, tagging, and commenting
• Evaluation – allowing companies to score innovation and promote the good ones
• Execution – although this was a little less clear to me, this is the idea that the promoted ideas would flow into SAP’s PPM solution to turn into product development projects

The first thing that stood out to me as evidence that this was based on practical experience was that they didn’t assume that getting more ideas was better. I run into vendors all the time who like to talk about helping their manufacturing customers get more ideas. All of my research and interviews end up with the same conclusion from manufacturers: “I don’t need more ideas, I need help sorting through all of the junk to find the good ones!” Manufacturers want better ideas, and they want a way to make sense of the volumes of input they get. Kudos to Colgate and SAP for getting this right, which I have to imagine came from Colgate’s real-world experience in innovation.

Another thing I was impressed with was the objectives of the project. They set out to build something “simple, usable, flexible, and extendable.” As well thought out as the solution seems, it doesn’t appear that they over-designed it. The solution does not look or feel like SAP, but instead is a light, web-based experience. While this might not be appropriate for the highly transactional world of traditional SAP solutions, it is ideal for this application where broad use by untrained participants is a key to success. After all, you don’t want all of your innovation coming from a few trained insiders!

One final point that Colgate made which I think is important to consider, is that the solution is not only valuable in the front end of innovation but throughout the new product development process. In fact, early use of the tool at Colgate has helped solve supply chain issues like cost reduction.

Implications for Manufacturers

The use of social computing techniques to drive innovation is beginning to take shape. SAP is clearly interested in providing this capability, as are standalone innovation management solutions such as Brightidea, Imaginatik, Ideajam, and others.  Some upcoming research I will publish soon with Kalypso shows that many manufacturers are getting started in the use of social media in innovation, and those that did are going to increase usage next year. Times are changing, and it will be interesting to see who can best take advantage of this new opportunity.

So that is what I heard from SAP and Colgate, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it. Who else should I be paying attention to in this space?