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Lucidspark: thoughts from a b-school instructor
October 14, 2021

Lucidspark: thoughts from a b-school instructor

Alex Naar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Lucidspark

I wanted to use it to give the students in my Intro to Business class an opportunity to experiment with different online collaboration and brainstorming tools. I thought this might be something they could use to make stakeholder maps, SWOT analysis, and business model canvases. I myself have never used these sorts of tools, but they seem to be increasingly important and sophisticated, and so I wanted to give the students the opportunity to try it out.
  • Easy to share (important for student assignments).
  • Simple to learn, although lots of hidden tools.
  • Ability to easily collaborate across groups.
  • Easy to confuse with other similar products.
  • Ridged color scheme.
  • More of a specialty tool than an all-rounder (although I think this may be a benefit since there are so many products that try and do everything but do none of it well).
  • Not many resources to guide me on how to use this in the classroom for student projects.
  • In my context, it's difficult to determine what the ROI is, although compared to Microsoft Whiteboard, what you have is much easier to introduce students to.
  • I don't see university faculty adopting a tool like this. There is too much learning they have to do, and paradoxically, university faculty don't like to learn.
  • I do worry about data security and how this tool could be better integrated with tools like Canvas and Blackboard.
There are some quirks to this tool that took a while to get the hang of. The snapping to grid and having buckets was something that didn't come to me naturally. In fact, there was a bit of confusion when I first started playing around with this because of that feature. But once I understood how things are laid out, it started to make more sense and was a benefit.
There was no integration with Canvas or Blackboard that I could see. This is where there seems to be the biggest push by the university to direct faculty to create and manage student assignments. Google Drive isn't supported by our university, so that collaboration wasn't very helpful. I don't think anything plays well with Microsoft products, though.
It seemed like an interesting product, and I could see many ways something like this could be a useful and powerful tool in business education contexts. One of the biggest challenges to teaching management courses online is how to foster group collaboration. And I am especially attracted to teaching solutions that students can carry with them after they graduate. A collaborative tool on Canvas, which they will never have access to again after they are no longer a student, isn't something I'm excited about students spending time learning how to use.
Yeah, it was ok. I wasn't completely sold on it or didn't see how it was different than other tools. And one of the issues with these sorts of things is there is a learning curve to them that many organizations and individuals seem resistant to use. I don't see this as something that could be adopted by a committee but would require fiat.

Do you think Lucidspark delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Lucidspark's feature set?

Yes

Did Lucidspark live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Lucidspark go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Lucidspark again?

No

I have only had incredibly negative experiences with Teams. It is impossible to use with students in any sort of effective manner. The most difficult issue with Teams is how difficult it is to share. While that may be a benefit in terms of data security, it makes it a nightmare for instructors.
Canvas, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)
Lucidspark seems especially good in the brainstorming phase of a project. And the sort functionality looks especially helpful. I could see how firms and organizations might use something like this to assess various needs. But the templates are very development and design-oriented. And there is minor linking back to underlying ideas or further reading on various topics. As a business educator, it's a bit like watching an adult give a group of kids a box of matches and some gasoline and tell them to make a fire. It's not just about having powerful tools, and it's also about helping people learn how to use those tools effectively. For example, integrating the Mitchell, Agle, and Wood stakeholder salience makes stakeholder mapping more meaningful of an exercise (for students and organizations).