Capture, organize, and prioritize ideas from anywhere

Successful products start with great ideas. There could be plenty of great ideas available for product managers to tap, from a wide range of sources – employee suggestions, spreadsheets, documents, email, and, most important, the mass of consumer-generated content in social media. But standalone methods of idea capture – the online “suggestion box,” or idea portal – have served only as places where great ideas go to die.

Here’s how some successful companies have succeeded in capturing thousands of ideas, from dozens of sources, in such a way as to track them, evaluate them, and transition the best ideas into their product development pipeline:

• Create both public and private customer communities to capture ideas, focus feedback, and protect IP. Public communities, available to all, are most useful for open brainstorming on ideas. Private communities provide a secure method for focusing a specific idea discussion or running “idea campaigns” based on relevant demographics – all while protecting vital trade secrets.
• Seed your customer communities with ideas and suggestions from employees and other sources – ideas tend to generate more ideas.
• Gather every idea you capture into a centralized repository. This streamlines communication and eliminates redundant requests – particularly valuable if you use an Agile development methodology.
• Use concepts such as idea clustering to gain greater perspective, continuous touch, and more control; helping your stakeholders collaborate around similar concepts also improves the quality of each idea while reducing administration time.

Accept Ideas is an on-demand idea management software solution that helps you implement these practices – and take them to the next level, where you can analyze, prioritize, and ultimately develop the best ideas. Accept Ideas first enables you to continuously capture ideas from virtually anywhere. Then by tightly integrating with Accept Requirements Management software and Portfolio Management software, Accept Ideas ensures you create a place where ideas are nurtured – not abandoned – and stay closely connected to the product development process.

Learn more about Accept’s suite of innovation software products to find out how you can deliver better products to market more swiftly.