HYPE Enterprise vs. IdeaScale

Well Suited

• Idea Generation campaigns aimed at solving a specific problem. Contributors can be limited to certain groups, or it can be open to the whole organization.
• Open Innovation campaigns aimed at getting solutions from external sources (add-on module required).
• Continuous improvement process specific to functional areas.
• Processing, sorting, evaluating and scoring ideas.

Not Well Suited

• Surveys
• Managing Projects

Incentivized

Ideascale is well suited for open innovation, private campaigns and sharing of knowledge across multiple organizations and boundaries.

• Hype Innovation allows for a full onsite implementation behind a firewall and does not need to communicate to an external server. This is a major advantage for a defense company.
• Hype Innovation is easily configurable by a systems admin with very limited knowledge of the product.
• Product Updates are rolled out quarterly and offered to all clients.
• Hype Innovation has a specific instance of their Hype software platform that is aimed at their clients and improving Hype itself. Feedback from their management is very quick.

Incentivized

• IdeaScale allows open and quick interaction.
• Campaign moderation is a breeze.
• Creation of the campaigns is very simple.

• The concepts and projects module requires an overhaul to be more flexible. This is on their product roadmap.
• The software would benefit from the addition of an MS Exchange integration for receiving idea e-mails.
• Customisation of the layout and possible custom components is challenging.

Incentivized

• The reporting platform needs improvement to make it easier to show results directly from the system.
• It takes time and effort to get traffic in the tool.

After evaluating numerous idea management and innovation management platforms, the main reasons we chose Hype Innovation were:

• On-premises installation (Viima did not allow this);
• Cost (Viima and IdeaDrop had substantially higher costs for the amount of users we required);
• Ease of Configuration (Viima was easiest to configure, but IdeaDrop was a challenge.);
• Customer Service (From initial contact to roll-out was 5 weeks).

Incentivized

IdeaScale is the first Ideation tool I came across.

• Longstanding issues with products and services have been made visible to the wider company and many solutions have been identified.
• A common idea management platform has allowed management to gauge the level of employee involvement and cross functional communication.
• Safe storage and archiving of ideas has enabled the company to keep track of inputs over time and refer back to ideas that were not relevant at the time of generation.
• The added workload of managing the innovation platform has meant that more money has had to be spent on the individual responsible for the platform.

Incentivized

• Ideascale was launched recently so no concrete ROI yet
• Supports driving innovation as a discipline internally and externally