Idea management systems

What percentage of your business knowledge is in your employee's minds?
What percentage of future ideas/innovations currently reside within your organisation?
How can you tap into ideas from outside your organisation?

An idea management system enables an organisation to solicit, capture and evaluate ideas submitted by both internal and external idea sources (or people as they're sometimes called!). My fave is "jenni" (see links below)and the following applies to jenni's offer. It is web based software and as such requires no installation and puts no strain on your servers.

So, how does it work?

All you do is pose a challenge to a variety of hand picked participants. This challenge has a definite cut off date so that participants know when to submit their ideas/thoughts. Ideas can be submitted and brought to life by the addition of images, files and weblinks. The system is open, transparent, collaborative and available 24/7 to any selected user wherever they may be.

Non-invitees cannot see the campaign nor access it. For those in charge of the campaign it provides a very effective and efficient system for requesting and capturing ideas.

I hear someone at the back ask "Why not use email?".

Two reasons: Firstly, a drastically reduced workload. You don't have to sift through and summarise large amounts of information. This system allows all participants to browse previously submitted ideas. This means no repetition and lots of collaboration. An ideawiki-type campaign allows later users to add to existing ideas and in effect become part of the team who have ownership of that idea.
Secondly, it doesn't stop with capturing ideas. They can be evaluated with more rigour than is normally applied to idea judgement. There are evaluation tools built into the system and your own business templates can be uploaded if required.

To compare to existing services doesn't really do it justice but think of a hybrid of a 21st Century suggestion box / email / online brainstorming and evaluation tool.