Clarity on PLM

I had the chance to talk with … Rob Fisher of Madison Electric Products following the 2011 Spike Summit. Amy Kenly of Kalypso presented his company with the Spike Award for Manufacturing for theirs Sparks Innovation Center. I think you will enjoy hearing about the opportunity that they saw and how they took advantage of it to develop some great new products.

Note: You can also listen to my interview with Spike Award winner for CPG Justin Winter and my interview with Spike Award Winner for Technology CDC Software.

The Sparks Innovation Center was created to gather product ideas from the large network of electrical contractors that Madison counts as customers. They realized that there were lots of potential product ideas in their customer community, and developed a crowdsourcing site to tap into that knowledge. I was impressed that Rob is as excited about helping the budding innovators in his customer base as he is developing new, successful products for his company (which they have done). This one is definitely worth a listen.

Rob’s presentation (along with mine and a number of others) is still available for replay by registering and attending the virtual event via the Spike Summit Expo. The entire virtual event was a great experience, and between the speakers and the award winners we all heard some great examples of social computing can help improve product innovation and product development.

Let us know what you think of their innovation center and crowdsourcing initiative. Do you like it? Have a similar example to share? Please feel free to check out the blog for more on social computing and product development or read a report on social computing and innovation.

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I had the chance to talk with … Robert Roy of CDC Software following the 2011 Spike Summit. Amy Kenly of Kalypso presented CDC Software with the Spike Award for Technology based on their use of social strategies, processes and supporting technologies to improve innovation, product management, and product development. Rob provided some great insight on the processes that CDC Software uses to get product feature ideas from their customer base for release planning as well as how they use social computing tools to collaborate during their agile development process.

Note: You can also listen to my interview with Spike Award winner for CPG Justin Winter and my interview with Manufacturing Spike Award Winner Madison Electric Products.

The CDC presentation (along with mine and a number of others) is still available for replay by registering and attending the virtual event via the Spike Summit Expo. The entire virtual event was a great experience, and between the speakers and the award winners we all heard some great examples of social computing can help improve product innovation and product development.

Let us know what you think of their program. Do you like it? Have a similar example to share? Please feel free to check out the blog for more on social computing and product development or read a report on social computing and innovation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I had the chance to talk with … Justin Winter of Diamond Candles following the 2011 Spike Summit. Amy Kenly of Kalypso presented Diamond Candles with the Spike Award for CPG (consumer packaged goods) based on their use of social strategies, processes and supporting technologies to improve innovation and product development. Justin provided some great insight on the program they used to get new product ideas from their customers.

Update: You can also listen to my interview with CDC Software for winning the Spike Award for Technology and my interview with Manufacturing Spike Award Winner Madison Electric Products.

I enjoyed hearing Justin’s presentation at the Spike awards. His presentation (along with mine and a number of others) is still available for replay by registering and attending the virtual event via the Spike Summit Expo. It’s a pretty cool experience. I was impressed with the way that Diamond Candles was able to share information with their customers, receive new product ideas from them, and then introduce the new products back to the customers. It was an interesting way to combine outbound marketing with crowdsourcing and gathering voice of the customer (VOC).

After talking to him, I even bought a candle. Wish me luck,  I hope I get one of the $5,000 rings in mine! If you don’t know what I am talking about, take a look at the Diamond Candles web site, their goal is to “make buying candles fun again.”

Let us know what you think of their program. Do you like it? Have a similar example to share? Feel free to look around the blog, you will see a lot of information on the use of social computing to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering.

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What I learned this week … came from some research I have been doing for a client. As a part of it, I have been spending a little more time getting to know the “Idea Management” software space. The conclusion that I am drawing is that while there are some mature software solutions to manage ideas, there are also a host of other specialty solutions that help generate the idea in the first place, analyze the idea, or further develop it.

Beyond Managing Ideas

I have always felt that there is more to idea management than “managing ideas.” That isn’t to say that simply managing ideas – including capturing them, categorizing them, and making them easy to retrieve is not important. What I am finding is that there are also solutions that:

• Filter and group ideas
• Prioritize and rank ideas
• Collaborate on ideas

Before Managing IdeasAnd of course in order to manage ideas, you have to have some. This is where some really creative solutions are popping up (or at least popping onto my radar screen). There are solutions that:

• Stimulate the submission of ideas
• Target and focus ideas on specific topics
• Provide a marketplace for those with ideas to meet those searching for them
• Account for rewards and recognition for ideas / innovation

Ideas and Social Computing

Some other interesting things I am running across include companies that are leveraging social networking and social computing to tap into communities for ideas and innovation. This is a very interesting topic by itself, including crowdsourcing among other techniques.

Idea Management as an Ecosystem

So there is a lot of variety in the “Idea Management” software ecosystem. Of course, many solutions cover more than one of the capabilities listed above. But like PLM – and even more than PLM – there is not a uniform, mature footprint shared by the competing solutions. There is a lot of innovation happening in innovation software.

So that is what I learned, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it. And if you know more than I do, please share it with all of us. What am I missing? What vendors should I learn more about?