As part of our preparation, Jay and I have been investigating the sponsors list for hot new E2 software. Some of our recent friends are there, but a few newcomers (to us) ponied up as well. Demo requests ensued and I can say that my consulting tires have really been rotated by one of the sponsors, Spigit.

Simply put, Spigit allows you to tune the impending barrage of systematized social interactions toward the vetting and implementation of innovative ideas. Through their proprietary algorithms (which I assume reference e at some point), Spigit’s Innovation Market module executes a sensible market-based approach for focusing the power of your crowd to create, collaborate around, promote, buy, and sell good ideas. Your crowd can be comprised of either external or internal stakeholders and based on their actions, their reputation and the ideas to which they contribute either sink or swim. Add on currency management, idea graduation (that sort of looks like an early Nintendo fav), and robust a dashboard for a really compelling approach to catalyzing innovation. This description is probably a gross oversimplification, so go check out the demo to really wrap your head around the concept. There are a couple obvious use cases that come to mind (i.e. Research and Development), but I thought I would throw out a few others that might be less so:

• Corporate Cost Savings – I have seen multiple attempts at using a suggestion box approach to find opportunities for fat trimming measures within organizations. While they produce varying results, it seems to me that using a more transparent, market approach to determine the “best” idea could be a little more successful. Johnny Employee may have an idea that will save costs for his team, department, or even geographic region. Instead of those ideas going through an opaque and limited review, why not float them by the whole organization and see what sticks. Understanding the impacts of these sorts of changes across a multitude of stakeholder will invariably make for better decision making and possibly avoid otherwise hidden dependency blunders.
• Performance Reviews – Toss out the qualitative project reviews and promote people based on the ability to foster and trade on innovation. Combine their reputation and account balance to determine a new form of corporate net worth. From another angle, use their ability to play the idea market as a primary performance indicator. If you can’t come up with good ideas, collaborate on good ideas, or recognize good ideas, should you really work here?
• Economic Development – I believe that the domain of international development work is ripe for some transparency. By extension, what if international donor agencies used an idea market to not only engage local stakeholders for solutions to problems (ideas) but provided actual funding to back the idea market currency. For example, create a market for ideas on how to spur the private sector of a recipient country. Local businesspeople can connect and trade on ideas with input from international experts or government officials at a significantly reduced cost to determine which ideas should be funded and which should not. This not only introduces an element of transparency and mass collaboration to development work, but may plant the venture capital seed within the loca l private sector. Sounds like development to me…

Long story short, Spigit is hot like chili and I didn’t even touch on their prediction market capabilities. I look forward to seeing them in Boston and strongly urge you to check out the approach for yourself.

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• Reduced Fat, Low Sugar Project Management – It’s like project management without the learning curve and maintenance bloat of Primavera or MS Project Server, but with more collaboration and usability flavor than a spreadsheet. Or in other words, a project management solution that addresses the overwhelming majority of projects. (small, quick, executed via email, completely un-reusable). It should probably be noted that if you are thinking about building a bridge to nowhere or (anywhere for that matter), this probably won’t cut it. It is still a great addition to the suite though.
• Firing Over the Wall – Based on what I would guess was overwhelming user feedback, Clearspace provides the ability for internal creations to be shared externally with partners, contractors, relatives, martians, whatever. This is a great addition and provides business value and capabilities, encouraging long-term viability of the corporate line-graying mantra of our E2 founding fathers.
• DIY UI – Building upon some super hip drag and drop features in the 1.x product tree, the 2.0 release allows users to completely configure their dashboard-esque view into the information flow. Admin-driven global/default views still exist, but the addition of user-tailorable views serve to neck down the firehose of info an any large organization. Dissect the stream into custom views based on who, what, when, or where.

IMHO those are some of the bigger improvements, but you owe it to yourself to take a test drive. Other highlights include world-class social networking features (as expected) and Clearspace X (for external communities) has been dubbed Clearspace Community.

So…hot, hot heat from Jive. Think MS noticed? Did you notice?

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