Ideas On-The-Go with MobileSpigit™ for iPhone

by Craik Pyke on 16/06/10 at 5:00 am

Craik Pyke is telecommunications architect and software developer specializing in mobile applications and a Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.

A large portion of my career has been spent in large telecommunications equipment companies and I’ve been witness to more methods to capture innovations than I care to recall. As a result, when I was approached to review MobileSpigit™

for the iPhone, I became interested in understanding their EnterpriseSpigit™ platform and how it was differentiated from those in the innovation management space.

I was fortunate enough to be given an overview by Spigit CTO Padmanabh Dabke. Spigit’s approach to harvesting innovation within a company is, to my experience, unmatched by other offerings. Instead of focusing merely on a means to capture the ideas of employees, they’ve focused on raising the visibility of ideas to the attention of as broad an audience as possible. In focusing on innovation as a collaborative effort, Spigit have gone to lengths to leverage community (dare I say “crowd sourcing”) notions – including building user rankings, reputations, and ‘idea currency’. Spigit encourages a broad community of participants to review and contribute to ideas; it even helps identify and merge similar ideas and combine the contributing parties into a team to further their shared ideas.

Picture 6 Ideas On The Go with MobileSpigit™ for iPhone

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of EnterpriseSpigit™ beyond the team aspects applied to collaboration is the application of data analytics to the process. The data analytics – RepUrank™ – are used to evaluate people and ideas irrespective of the depth of their social network. With their RepUrank™ analytics, Spigit assert “… the best ideas and people are elevated, not just the most popular.”

EnterpriseSpigit™ ties their offering together by providing an overall dashboard for the organisations efforts, tracking ideas, members and overall usage.

The Spigit team realized that you cannot contain innovation to the office. Ideas often flow when individuals are outside the work environment. Thus, Spigit™ introduced MobileSpigit™ for the iPhone.

The MobileSpigit™ application is not simply the EnterpriseSpigit™ interface crammed on the iPhone; the Spigit team have focused instead on delivering an interface optimized for the mobile experience. MobileSpigit™ focuses on giving users access to key functionality while away from the office in simple interface. It provides users access to key functions of posting (creating an idea), reviewing ideas, commenting, searching/exploring ideas, and viewing a simplified version of the dashboard (the leader-board specifically).

Where EnterpriseSpigit™ provides a broad set of data and associated visualizations, MobileSpigit™ is a simplified and pleasing interface to use on the iPhone. As with other applications that I list amongst my favorites, I find that in the general use cases the MobileSpigit™ interface is a faster and easier portal into EnterpriseSpigit™.

Idea Details Ideas On The Go with MobileSpigit™ for iPhone

Such ease of use is key in encouraging employees to document their ideas and to review the ideas of others, especially when the participants are not near a machine with the necessary access to the corporate network.

Overall I was very impressed with both EnterpriseSpigit™ and MobileSpigit™. Together, the products go to great lengths to address the persistent issue (especially in large business) of capturing the ideas that employees have, vetting them and determining the best ones in which to invest the companies resources. The MobileSpigit™ interface is one of the best I’ve seen in terms of consistency and ease of use.

If there were one thing I’d like to see about MobileSpigit™, it would be the availability of the interface in conjunction with the SMB version of the Spigit platform (WE by Spigit for SMB). Obviously small businesses tend not to suffer the same issues of scale and problems vetting innovative ideas as large companies do; however the interface user experience and overall freedom provided by MobileSpigit I can only see as an asset to the SMB offering.