Imaginatik Takes Idea Management Mobile

Idea Central Mobile lets BlackBerry and iPhone users access their collaboration site from their smartphones and other mobile devices.Imaginatik combines a collaborative intelligence and idea management platform, called Idea Central, with an assortment of services to enable companies to get the most out of their contributors' ideas. Most of the company's customers are larger enterprises, but Content Editor Bryan Mahoney insists that SMBs can benefit as well. "A lot of companies, especially smaller ones, want to invest in a tool and a tool only. They lose sight of the larger goal, which is not just to collect ideas but to drive innovation. A lot of collaborative intelligence systems set metrics around the number of ideas collected, but not their implementation."

For that reason, Imaginatik provides not just its Web-based platform but consulting and best-practices services as well. "We help a client define the problem they're trying to solve," says Mahoney, "and help configure and build out the software to support that. And after the 'innovation event,' we coach the review team on how to proceed with the ideas."

Larger enterprises might choose to deploy Idea Central internally, but it can also operate as a hosted service. In fact, according to Mahoney, a majority of their clients use the hosted service; on-site deployment is usually for security reasons. The SaaS model combined with flexible pricing that's based on what the client company wants to accomplish makes the platform accessible to midsize businesses as well.

Since April, a new module for the platform, Idea Central Mobile, has been in the hands of a limited number of users. As of this week, though, the Mobile module -- essentially a mobile-oriented window into the Idea Central platform -- has been available to all customers. The module was specifically designed for iPhones and BlackBerrys, but it will work with any browser that fully supports JavaScript and CSS (which means it also works with certain Android devices).

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