We’ve heard a lot about how idea management works in theory – but how does it work in practice? Ann Marie Dumais, Senior Vice President of New Product Introductions atThe Nielsen Company, was kind enough to walk us through Nielsen’s use ofBrightIdea for enterprise idea management. Here are the lessons we came away with.

When Selecting Your Platform, Know What You’re Looking For

Dumais said Nielsen decided to adopt idea management software because it wanted to put process around thoughts. That may seem a bit corporate. OK, that sounds ridiculously corporate. But considering the company had found that it had no shortage of ideas coming from staff and no good means to do anything with them, it makes sense. The company wanted to drive ideation faster, and didn’t want to chase ideas that had already been considered.

Dumais said they needed something flexible – something that would enable them to make changes on the fly by themselves, without calling IT or an external vendor. She also needed something that would be easy for all staff, including those dealing with the backend. “It had to be like eBay,” she said “No one had to teach us how to use eBay – it just works.” Dumais also knew the system would have to support single sign-on.

After vetting several possibilities, Dumais and her team settled on BrightIdea because of its flexibility and usability.

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