New Site Crowdsources New Way to Value Markets and Companies

PLEASANTON, CA and PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwire – May 16, 2012) – Spigit, the leader in social innovation software and services, and Aragon Research, a new technology focused research and advisory firm committed to providing thought leading strategic research and trusted advisory services, today announced the launch of the Open Forecast Project, a new market valuation community designed to use the power of the crowd to accurately size and value emerging technology markets. The new community will launch a series of challenges, beginning with Enterprise Social Software, which will tap the crowd to weigh in on proposed solutions for determining the total addressable market for different sectors.

“Measuring the total addressable market is an extremely difficult exercise, especially in emerging markets,” said Jim Lundy, founder and CEO, Aragon Research. “With this new community, we’re using the power of crowdsourcing to open the previously closed and secret market sizing model to create an accurate, forward-looking valuation of important emerging markets, such as Enterprise Social Software.”

The Open Forecast Project will create a new option for valuing companies and market opportunities in a three-phased approach:

• Phase One: Submission and Valuation: Beginning on Wednesday, May 16^th, the Enterprise Social Software market valuation community opens to select guests including investors, analysts, chief marketing officers and market makers. Guests will have until May 26^th to post valuations and logic, to garner comments and votes and to rack up points to spend in the online store or to invest in the stock market in phase two.
• Phase Two: The Game: Beginning on Tuesday, May 22^nd, the stock market on the site will open so that participants can invest in different estimates in order to create a weighted average of the top valuations. Finally, on Saturday, May 26^th, the participant with the highest participation based on points and the participant with the highest reputation will be eligible to win an iPad.
• Phase Three: Extending the Crowd: On Tuesday, May 29^th, the market will reopen to the public allowing anyone to register, trade in the different valuations and earn points that can be used in the online store. This phase will run through Friday, June 1^st.

“We’re applying Spigit’s social innovation framework to create a new, crowd-driven method for quantifying market opportunities,” said Paul Pluschkell, CEO and founder, Spigit. “By gathering and vetting qualified experts’ valuations and the logic behind them, we are sure that we can minimize uncertainty that exists in the question of total addressable market in emerging sectors.”

Whether a startup vying for funding, an investor assessing a new opportunity, or an analyst advising both parties, the total addressable market and revenue opportunities available for a product or service can help prioritize business opportunities. The Open Forecast Project will use the collective intelligence of Spigit and Aragon’s investor and analyst community, as well as the feedback and voting of the crowd to help identify the value of new markets.

To learn more about Spigit and Aragon’s Open Forecast Project and to get started with Enterprise Social Software valuations, voting, or to learn how you can get the results visit https://main.aragon.spigit.com.

About Spigit
Diversity of insight is often the source of the most innovative solutions. Spigit is a platform that enables organizations to tap into the collective intelligence of employees, customers, partners and fans to help tackle business objectives.

By incorporating game mechanics, Spigit first engages your people at scale. Using social algorithms Spigit then leverages this crowd to do the heavy lifting and surface and vet the most promising ideas through collaboration. Finally, with big data analytics Spigit pinpoints actionable and predictive information that drives results.

The largest and most innovative companies in the world use Spigit including Overstock.com, AAA, US Bank, City of New York, Estee Lauder and Capgemini. For more information about how you can enable crowd innovation for your enterprise, visit www.Spigit.com, email info@spigit.com or call 1-855-SPIGIT1.

About Aragon Research
Aragon Research is the newest technology research and advisory firm. Aragon delivers high impact research and advisory services to provide enterprises the insight they need to help them make better technology and strategy decisions. Aragon Research serves business and IT leaders covering the Knowledge, Collaboration, Social, Content Management, Workplace, Mobile and Tablet, and User Experience/Portal markets. The principals hold over 50 years of industry experience between them. Aragon Research is privately held. For more information, visit https://www.aragonresearch.com.

Media Contacts:

• Sarah Borup
  SHIFT Communications
  617-779-1803
  spigit@shiftcomm.com
  
  Anne Lawrenson
  Spigit
  925-452-6519
  alawrenson@spigit.com

Copyright 2012 Marketwire, Inc., All rights reserved.

By: Kelly Liyakasa

If you want better results from employees and customers, let them play. At least, that’s what industry experts are saying about gamification, or “gamifying” business processes. Using game mechanics to influence behaviors has emerged as a viable means for companies to achieve desired results. For companies that want more attention, participation, and, of course, business, it’s an innovative way to engage customers.

Combining work and play might sound counterintuitive, but companies that do so are already noticing real results. Samsung, for instance, mixed frivolity with serious business initiatives when it created the social loyalty program Samsung Nation through behavior platform Badgeville. The purpose? To grow its user-generated content and traffic on its global Web site. Fueling competition, the game lets users level up, unlock badges, and gain subsequent rewards and recognition. Samsung, in return, saw 66 percent more users submitting 447 percent more product answers on its global Web site. Even more impressive, the user-generated content prompted 34 percent of users to put 224 percent more items in shopping carts.

Gamification can also be used to motivate employees. Pharmaceutical company Omnicare, which uses IT management cloud service ServiceNow, introduced gamification to improve its IT Service Desk operating model. “We had stories of twenty-minute hold times, and our abandonment rate was in the twenty-five to thirty percent mark,” says Kim Liston, senior director of service delivery.

Naturally, this was not acceptable to Omnicare’s executive team, so Liston was asked to improve the numbers. But her efforts were first met with the proverbial foot-drag. “These are highly technical people who loved to spend hours in the bowels of a PC, and all of a sudden, you’re holding them accountable to inbound performance and stats and you’re measuring the heck out of them,” Liston says. “We had a little bit of a culture clash.”

Using a technique found in role-playing games, service team members worked to accumulate points and rewards like gift cards to Amazon.com and movie tickets. “We had a lot of success from a performance perspective, but management overhead was a bit substantial, and while it was fun [for workers], it didn’t stick with them,” Liston says.

What followed was the creation of an automated OmniQuest game, which included achievements, rewards (in the form of badges), and real-time feedback within the ServiceNow platform. It saw 100 percent participation from team members.

Introducing game techniques into the enterprise can motivate employees to perform specific behaviors, but it can also improve morale and excitement around tasks, projects, and even job roles. “I was struck by [a comment] made by one of my overnight technicians,” remarks Tim Deniston, help desk manager at Omnicare. “He said, ‘Bossman, I’m so excited. Every night I come in, I can’t wait to see what my badges are.’ Competition is another thing that can come of this. You hear chatter like, ‘I just leveled up for this particular badge.’ It’s very valuable. It gets people excited.”

How Games Work

Gamification digs deep to create something that fosters change and sustains behaviors.

To get people to learn new behaviors, they must become familiar and comfortable with them, says gaming expert Justin Gary, who created an entrepreneurship game for University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business students and consulted with MySpace on user engagement.

That’s what gamification does. “It’s using the dynamics and mechanics of psychology that make games so addicting, so sticky, so engaging,” explains Kevin Akeroyd, senior vice president of field operations for Badgeville.

Curiosity and personal achievement play a part. “We are…built to want to ‘know’ and understand what’s going on,” Gary says. “Everybody wants to feel like they’re progressing….The goal is to make people do the behaviors you want them to because it’s what they want to do.”

It’s “behavior management,” Akeroyd stresses. The things that make games so compelling “can equally make employees, partners, [and] customers addicted to your B2B or B2C offering.”

To gamify a business process, organizations must define goals for users, track their behaviors, and reward them when goals are met. Bunchball, a gamification software developer, can do these things and enable users to compete for position on league tables, create virtual identities for self-expression, collaborate as part of a team, and post comments or videos on Facebook and Twitter for rewards.

Badgeville, a competitor to Bunchball, can track users’ performance data to motivate behavior, reward top performers, and create real-time notifications to engage inactive users.

When business processes are gamified well, organizations can see positive results, including cold hard cash. James Gardner was chief technology officer for the U.K. Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) when he encountered a situation where games prevailed. “I needed to create a system that made innovation happen, and I needed to do that in an environment where everybody had ‘day jobs.’”

That’s when he came across Spigit, an innovation management solutions company. Spigit and Gardner’s agency gamified government processes by creating DWP’s Idea Street initiative in 2007. Through a virtual trading platform, British civil servants could buy and sell stock in new ideas with a virtual currency. What followed was a crowd-sourcing effort that called on civil servants to turn ideation into real cost savings. Those who posted comments and helped execute change could accrue more points, and were even rewarded through promotions. In one case, a call center employee came up with the idea to create internal marketing materials, resulting in that employee’s transfer to the office of the head of the DWP.

In less than nine months, the DWP incurred about $41 million in hard savings by innovating its business processes, Gardner says. “The [employees] found motivation through games we were playing to submit new ideas for change and actually execute new ideas, and the money just added up over time,” Gardner explains. Gardner, now the chief strategy officer for innovation management at Spigit, describes this as a case where a group of busy individuals wholly resistant to change “made change happen.”

Gamification can also make intimidating processes fun, which could help boost sales. Adobe needed a way to encourage trial users to become paid licensees of Photoshop. However, sometimes anxiety over learning how to use the software can get in the way. So, gamification platform provider Bunchball created LevelUp for Adobe Photoshop. The game trained users “how to use Photoshop by doing, and not just reading the manual or watching tutorial content,” explains Rajat Paharia, cofounder and chief product officer of Bunchball. As you complete a task and learn how to “master object removal,” your progress score goes up. The game sent users on missions like “remove red eye” or “touch up this photo,” and players were able to earn points, rewards, and the chance to win Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection software.

The Reward

Before starting, organizations must figure out how to entice participants. Designing a rewards structure that encourages desired behaviors requires a look at the “relative value of rewards for the actions being incentivized,” according to “Demystifying Enterprise Gamification for Business,” a study conducted by Constellation Research.

Financial rewards certainly work, but they’re not the only way to motivate participants. Offering points, status, rewards, voting power, and early access are all viable ways to motivate participants.

Bragging rights can also be a motivator, especially when social media or a group environment is involved. “The more social an experience becomes, the more valuable [things like] lead access and reputation are,” says Scott Schnaars, director of sales for Badgeville.

Rewards may be about “access,” which can be as simple as granting one-on-one time with a corporate chief, says Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research. Or they could come in the form of engagement, inviting customers to “be a part of our test phase” or “name our product,” which would allow the winner to bask in the glow of having his idea selected from thousands.

Making a Case for Work-Play Balance

Enterprises are eyeing game mechanics for business and customer processes, but gamification as an industry whole is just emerging.

“I would not say this is a ubiquitous thing,” maintains T.J. Keitt, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. “You do see, ‘Jive reaches an agreement with Bunchball’ or ‘Spigit or Brightidea begin to use these techniques in their innovation management technology,’ but this doesn’t translate to companies as a whole saying, ‘We’re going to use these techniques (within) a given deployment.’ There is interest…but there are a number of things that can stymie adoption.”

For one, there are cultural considerations. Five generations now populate the workplace, Wang says, and Generations X and Y may be more apt to meld business and social personas than their Baby Boomer counterparts.

Steve DeMarco, vice president of corporate sales for Xactly, says that the automated sales compensation company has seen younger inside sales team members motivated by recognition and not only reward. “They should call [Gen Y] the Resume Generation,” DeMarco says. “They get the ‘I Was the Sales Rep of the Month Three Months in a Row’ (honor) and it’s up right away. It’s on LinkedIn. It’s everywhere. It’s constantly updated for anything they deem an accolade.”

The whole notion of the president’s club and the leaderboard have been part of the sales culture for a long time. But within Xactly’s inside sales team, usage has grown and evolved.

“Now it’s about using the leaderboard on a more granular level and beginning to gamify daily, weekly, and monthly contests for various metrics that are being shown on the leaderboard,” DeMarco explains. “It’s making sure the results of (employees) winning the Call Volume Contest are fed back to the organization.”

DeMarco has even seen Boomers get excited about awards and incentives because the competition gets creative juices flowing. “Things like making sure [employees'] CRM tool or administrative stuff is up to date…you might use game mechanics to drive that behavior, so it’s not purely sales and revenue related, but maybe it’s customer satisfaction related,” DeMarco adds.

In addition to demographic considerations, changes in roles and responsibilities must also be factored in.

Getting in the Game

As with any technology implementation, organizations must clearly define a need for gamification. In the case of SAP Labs, social games have been a driver within its developer and user network community. Participants win points and level up when they contribute content to blogs and forums.

SAP Labs also looked at video games to see “what we can learn in the business and software world to improve our technology,” says Mario Herger, senior innovation strategist at SAP Labs, who heads the gamification effort at SAP Labs across departments like Sustainability and On Demand.

Gamification opens new doors in behavior management and innovation. But the future of games in the enterprise will rely on how they’re actually used.

“In a consumer environment, you have a choice to use a gamified application,” Herger says, citing Amazon.com as an example. “If I don’t like [the game mechanics], I can go to another Web site and buy the same book there. But an employee has no choice. If an employee has to interact with a system, [you have to look at,] ‘Is it temporary?’or ‘Is it continuously running, and what do I do with the data I collect inside my organization?’”

In addition to managing data volume, organizations will have to figure out where gamification fits into their budget and whether executive teams will be keen on adoption.

“If you can go to a CEO and say, ‘Outbound call activity was X for the first five weeks and we had this contest, which resulted in a twenty percent increase across the board,’ it’s going to get their attention,” DeMarco advises.

Gartner Research predicts that by 2014, more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will incorporate at least one gamified application or process. Though gamification can be driven by “novelty and hype,” Gartner says it is a trend that will significantly unfold over the next five years.

Playing on the job may not sound productive, but gamification experts beg to differ. “This is not fluffy stuff that doesn’t work,” Wang points out. “This is about real brands doing real stuff.”

Feel-Good Games

Gamification has been called everything from “hype” to “fad,” but it could earn its rightful place as a valid business tool. A number of niche game platforms have crept up, all laying claim to a specific effort to get users engaged.

Pledge4good is a social platform that turns good deeds into a social experience. Users pledge as little as one dollar to select nonprofits for performing everyday tasks, like losing a pound. Users can invite friends from social networks to sponsor their cause and applaud them once they’ve achieved and announced the accomplishment on the mobile platform.

Recyclebank has a similar model, but encourages users to go green and perform earth-friendly actions and get their friends involved. Participants earn points for rewards that include a discount on groceries.

Another game-centric platform, Payoff.com, recently raised $2 million in financing to expand its platform and its service to help users pay down their personal debt and to get their personal finances in order.

“At the end of the day, brands need consumers and consumers need brands,” says Scott Saunders, founder of Payoff.com. “This is not just a feel-good thing. This is an enlightened self-interest thing for brands.”

The way Payoff.com works is that users set a personal finance goal and gain a snapshot into their spending across various bank accounts. Payoff.com works with brands like Target and Starbucks to “design badges that will make people more likely to pay their bills, or more likely to switch from paper to digital statements,” according to Saunders.

When a partner company awards a customer, that customer can share the news with friends on social networks or members of the Payoff community.

Where game platforms like Payoff and Pledge4good will fit into the world of Badgeville and Bunchball remains to be seen, but developers see it as favorable.

“For me, the more competition the better,” says Jay Melone, president of Web design and mobile apps company DigitalXBridge. “Just as long as they don’t cannibalize each other.”

Associate Editor Kelly Liyakasa can be reached at kliyakasa@infotoday.com.

Read this comment by George Ciardi from a discussion about why products fail in the Market Research Group on LinkedIn:

While proper research could certainly be part of the blame for the failure of some new products, I also see the realities of business pressures to launch “no matter what the research says”.

Most companies have internal objective to launch new products throughout the year. These new product launches have sales estimates of demand, which in turn feed through to company projections of future growth.

If you accept my statement to be true for a moment, then it would seem that part of the solution is to have a more flexible business plan and a corporate culture that would permit business objectives to be more fluid and allow for products not to be launched that are not ready to market in the first place.

But who is going to tell the CEO that they will miss their second half sales estimates because their new product isn’t ready to launch just yet? Do we have any takers for that assignment?

A rush to “get something out” can be driven by the calendar. In startup companies, specifically software ones, the advice is to release often. Get stuff out there, see how it performs. Y Combinator’s Paul Graham advocates this.

But does that advice work for large companies? Not just software entities, but other industries as well? It’s not as realistic. PT Boats can adjust course and channel resources much more quickly than can aircraft carriers.

Which puts a premium on “getting it right” as much as possible before release. Not fix what went wrong afterwards. One can argue that philosophically, big companies just need to be more nimble. That advice and $3.00 will get you a cup of coffee.

Big organizations would do well with a slower development cycle that…

Puts a premium on understanding customers jobs-to-be-done: Before developing anything, spend time talking with customers about what their needs, desires and pain points are. There is some of this via focus groups, but my sense is that those are (i) sporadically used; (ii) designed to elicit opinions on something already in development. People who express these jobs are potentially good candidates for any co-creation the company wishes to engage in.

Allows for small experiments: Once you’ve got a bead on what jobs customers are hiring for, try out some solutions. In many ways, this is taking a page from Steve Blank’s customer development methodology. Talk with some customers, particularly the ones who identified the job-to-be-done.

Finally, senior executives need to look at this as an essential part of increasing the odds of success for new product introductions.

We’ve launched ICON.

It has almost 200 companies signed up in less than 2 days. We’re feeling hopeful we have something people will really value. If you’ve already had a go of the tool, thank you. If not, signup is free, so please do try it.

Today, I wanted to talk about the process of getting a brand new product from idea to production. It was a cycle that’s had all the standard behaviours any company goes through when it attempt to do something new.

Are you surprised a company that does innovation for a living is really no different internally to any other company when it comes to doing innovation?

It is why doing innovation is hard. Here’s the inside story on the germination of Icon at Spigit.

Triggering The Innovation Antibodies

As I’ve written before, every genuinely new thing you suggest in an organization creates winners and losers. The losers quickly form groups to defend their territory.  There’s nothing aggressive or bad about this, it is just human behaviour.

But you have to be ready for it.

When we proposed a freemium offer internally a year ago, many people in our company were horrified.  In particular, revenue generating folk were strongly opposed. Their concern, obviously, was we’d cannibalize revenues from our enterprise idea management platform, Engage. How would they get paid on something that was free? And, they wanted to know, what would they tell their customers?

Icon, as it stands today, is pretty much in a separate space from our other products, but at the start, it wasn’t clear to everyone what our intentions were.

Here’s the problem you face: invariably, those with the most to lose are the ones who worry the most. They’re also the most vocal. Unless you’re careful, your concept gets shut down before you even start.

Vocal people with established business lines tend to have quite a bit more pull than a small group with a bit of an idea.  Furthermore, it simply isn’t reasonable to expect everyone in a company – even an innovation company – to be in an innovation-preferred segment. There are still late majority and laggard personality styles to contend with.

They’ll object to anything that deviates from the established trajectory, because these are the people you pay to make sure the established trajectory delivers. It isn’t malicious behaviour, they think they’re doing their jobs.

Actually, they are doing their jobs when they object.

Lesson 1: People will object. They’ll try to shut it down. Be ready with decent, non-confrontational arguments. Be prepared to take a longer term view, and create a momentum of agreement. Eventually, you get enough people on side your idea will become real.

The Attack Dogs Rise

As an idea gains momentum, and it looks as if it might actually start to happen, new behaviours start to assert themselves. This is especially true when resources start to get assigned to moving things forwards.

Spigit is still pretty much a startup, so our resources, especially in dev and design, are not unlimited.

But we’d decided with this product we wanted a beautiful user interface, one that people would look at and go “wow” no matter what device they were on. So that meant that we sucked up every graphic designer and UI developer in the company.

And then we wanted to make sure we had a beautiful backend, one that we could be proud to expose to the world eventually as an API. And that meant we sucked up the best engineers in the company as well.

In the meantime, other products still had their requirements too. And we’d taken many of the best the resources to do something that was gong to be “free”.

We were at the stage when people understood we were making an important play, but  couldn’t see anything except how inconvenient we were making things for everyone else.

This, too, is true of innovations in any company of any size. The pain that precedes any result is usually quite substantial, and you have to somehow show people that the stuff which will come out the end will be worth it.

We were lucky, though, that our engineering team decided to use an agile methodology for the build. It meant we had stuff to show very early.

Actually, one day, I walked past Paul’s office (our CEO) and discovered he’d been showing prospective customers our early wireframes.  Firstly, I was surprised he’d even gotten them, and then piqued that he was showing stuff that early.

But the point is, he had something to show. We were causing significant upheaval in the company but at least people could see early results. It is what saved our project from the attack dogs who wanted it shut down, or scaled back, or diluted to something that wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.

I don’t mean to be critical when I use the term “attack dog”, by the way. But as a person who studies innovation for a living, that really is the best characterisation of what happens when groups of people are threatened by something new. They form packs to defend their territory, and can be vicious when they don’t get what they (think) they need to perform their own jobs.

Again, I must emphasize that in companies with established businesses, this is what you pay these people to do.  You can’t possibly run a repeatable business without them.

On the other hand, of course, they’re the reason doing innovation so hard. Even for an innovation company.

Lesson 2: The attack dogs will rise. Your only defence is to have results early, something to show. Otherwise, it is all pain and no gain, and you will either be shut down or watered down. Be ready with great evidence of progress.

The Success Cats Come In

Eventually, you get your new thing to a point where even the most vocal objector can see there’s enough momentum that cancellation isn’t an option. At this point some of these folks even convert to the vision.

It is tempting, when everyone starts getting excited about the new thing, to relax and breathe a sigh of relief.  This is a mistake.

Two years ago, in my book “Innovation and the Future Proof Bank”, I wrote:

“Implementing innovation is a process of managing compromise… everyone will propose changes and enhancements to support their particular agenda. This results in dilution of the original idea which justified investment in the first place. Carefully select the compromises you allow so you have sufficient political capital to reject ones which have a dilutive effect on the initial proposition”.

There is a correlation between the amount of excitement your new product generates and the number of people and groups who want in on it. Success breeds success, obviously, but what you don’t want is a whole pile of new stuff introduced late.

As we got closer to the end and a launch, there were lots of suggestions made about product changes we should make and features we should add.

Now, I hasten to say, some of these were excellent.

But that is irrelevant.

Introducing things late is almost always a mistake. You have to hack your engineering and design, and invariably, the lack of thinking about implications bites you.

We had this a few times, and in the end had to make certain compromises to fit stuff in. For example, we had to limit the browsers we could support in order to free up development and QA time. The only version of IE we support right now, for example is IE9.

Most corporates don’t even have IE9 yet. So this was a significant and painful compromise. We’ll get to supporting IE8 and others, but since our target market is corporates, we hated having to do it.

Also, I think we made some pretty unreasonable demands on our wonderful development, design, and QA folk towards the end. I don’t really know how they lived through it, myself.

Perhaps if the team and I had managed compromises better, some of the scramble at the end would have been less painful than it was.

Lesson 3: Everyone wants to be a part of something that looks like it will be a success. To get their name on things, they’ll try to change your product in some way. Carefully manage this, and don’t accept stuff that will muck up the overall product if you can avoid it.

Out the Door

So we launched 2 days ago, and adoption is looking good.

People are feeding back positive things.

And we’re about to start the whole next development cycle, which will have icon do some more exciting things in June.

I’ll post back then with stories of how the second dev cycle went, and what we did differently this time around.

David F. Carr | May 01, 2012

Idea generation and cultivation tool adds Yammer integration, aims for larger audience with free Icon version.

Taking a page from Yammer’s freemium cloud application playbook, Spigit is offering a version of its idea generation and cultivation tool that you can get for free, just by volunteering an email address.

Just like Yammer, Icon by Spigit will create internal employee collaboration groups (in this case, specifically for the purpose of idea generation) by grouping by email domains the users who sign up for the free product. Like Yammer, Spigit also plans to offer upgrades to paid plans with more administrative tools, including the ability to create collaboration groups that span multiple email domains, in an update coming this summer. The free version was released Tuesday.

Beyond paralleling the Yammer business model, Icon is available as a social application that you can access with your Yammer login, making progress of your idea-generation projects visible in the Yammer activity stream.

Spigit is in the business of idea management, or ideation–harnessing the creative power of crowds to generate ideas and identify the best ones. Trying to distinguish itself in a crowded market where it counts 41 competitors doing something similar, “we decided it was probably a good idea for us to see what anybody could do with an innovation platform, if we could give it a price of zero,” said James Gardner, chief strategy officer at Spigit.

Spigit has been plying its trade with large organizations and crowdsourcing projects that reach hundreds of thousands of individuals, Gardner said, but meanwhile “there is this other group that is unserved, where smaller crowds or workgroups within organizations need to solve the same issues.”

Icon is not identical to the Engage platform Spigit offers to large enterprises, the one that powers WestJet’s program for gathering employee cost-cutting suggestions, for example. Our colleagues in the TechWeb conference group also use Spigit as the basis of the Enterprise 2.0 conference call for papers process for submitting session ideas.

Icon doesn’t offer as many choices, instead guiding users down a simple path to launching a challenge or responding to a challenge with their own ideas. The home page is a leaderboard showing the most active users and the challenges that are currently running. Applying the principles of gamification, Icon assigns each user a pool of points they must spend to launch a challenge. The people whose ideas rank highest at the end of the challenge, based on the votes of other participants, win points and the glory of recognition. Challenge sponsors also get points for creating challenges that create a lot of interest. This structure discourages people from posting frivolous challenges, Gardner said. “I’m motivated to create challenges people are interested in.”

The creator of a challenge can promote it by sharing the link through email or through Yammer, if that integration is in place.

The voting process is also simplified. The system rotates the ideas that have been submitted for display, two at a time, at the top of the challenge details screen. Users are then asked to vote for the one they think is most promising–a simple “hot or not” ranking, in the words of the press release–and the process continues until all ideas in the contest have been given an equal chance. “We guarantee the same number of eyeballs for each combination,” Gardner said.

Icon has been designed with a responsive user interface that updates continually via Ajax, with HTML5 formatting that adapts to the screen dimensions of a PC, an iPad, or an iPhone-class device.

Part of Spigit’s deal with Yammer is to position itself as a natural addition to the enterprise social network, right at the moment that Yammer is nixing its own ideation product.

Yammer VP of product James Patterson said the company is discontinuing the Ideas application it had in beta for the past year. “A small handful of companies actually turned that on, so we decided to phase that out for lack of adoption,” he said. Yammer’s ambition is to be “the social layer across all business apps,” not necessarily to build a lot of the underlying applications itself, he said. Instead, it offers its customers lightweight apps for functions like content management while also striving to link to established enterprise content management systems, he said. In the case of idea management, the Yammer Ideas app turned out to be a little too lightweight.

The company recognized it would have to add a lot more features to make Yammer Ideas useful, Patterson said, “and it basically became too complicated–we decided we didn’t want to go down that path.”

Spigit is a major partner, but the relationship is not exclusive, Patterson said. Yammer also partners with competing players like Bright Ideas. Yammer wants to build a symbiotic relationship with all its integration partners like the one between Facebook and Zynga, where Facebook “provides the platform that makes social gaming even possible” while Zynga provides the games themselves, Patterson said. “If other companies are building their engagement layer on top of us, it increases the value of Yammer.”

Meanwhile, Spigit saw an opportunity to build on an established partnership with Yammer. “Yammer is very clear about what business it’s in, and at the same time Yammer wanted to partner with us on ideation. We’re very excited about that. Also, we decided to make this free until you want control, which is directly compatible with Yammer’s model,” he said.

Icon is mimicking a Yammer strategy that draws objections from some IT managers who see the freemium model as a trap for luring in users into an unsanctioned collaboration environment. It’s also celebrated by organizations like the SuperValu grocery chain, which used its initial ad hoc deployments as a proof of concept for what has since become a corporate standard.

“Icon’s model, like Yammer’s before it, is somewhat disruptive to the command and control that’s traditionally been quite a big part of large technology shops,” Gardner acknowledged in an email follow-up. “We think Yammer and the ‘bring your own device’ movement have educated traditionalist technologists to the benefits of these kinds of tools. They are the sorts of tools that are very hard to justify from a business case perspective before they’re up and running, but quite invaluable once they are. Our hope is that we will be able to strike the right balance between functionality and control so that both sides will have a lot to gain.”

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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Idea management has gotten quite boring lately. Everyone, it seems has a tool. And they all do the same old thing.

Put your idea in. Vote a few times..

Be irritated when no one cares.

Repeat until you shut down idea management in disgust.

I’ve been dark for the last month or so on this blog, because I’ve been involved in imagining and building a fresh look at the problem.

Our realization was social interactions online are all very good, but they’re only useful for individual communications and one to many broadcasts.

If you’re trying to find the golden nugget, that gem of an idea that changes everything, you need a different unit of aggregation than individuals. You need to get quick, accurate consensus across groups.

So we built Icon, our new platform for collective intelligence. It’s a game with serious intentions.

Firstly, it’s a social network, but one with a difference. The basic unit of work is your expressed preference for one of you’re colleagues ideas over another. Instead of voting, you say “I’d rather have this, than that”.

Secondly, it is a game. Internally at Spigit, we’ve been using it for a month, and people get addicted quite quickly. Anyone can ask a question on anything, and expect to get quick results. Today, for example, someone started a whole thing on the best Super Power to have, and why?

At Spigit, the crowd is presently saying:

1. The power to turn socially awkward situations into song and dance routines from Chicago
2. The power to steal the super powers of others
3. The ability to f**t glitter (this was suggested by one of our brilliant designers).

This from a field of lots of suggestions, most more serious than No. 3

Now, you’d think this was all spammy and time wasting, but actually, it is really good fun. Sometimes you need fun when you’re dealing with other questions which are presently running, such as

“What are the top product enhancements or bug fixes to enhance the customer experience” – Spigit Says “Enhance Idea Merge and Combine”

or

“Delocalizing Spigit- How best to work across timezones”, for which Spigit Says “Support a Shift System”.

What we’re doing with Icon is implementing “[Your Company] Says” for any question that anyone inside asks.

That’s an important new capability, and one that I think lots of people would like to have.

I invite you all to try Icon, and I’d love to hear your feedback. Its free.

By Hutch Carpenter | May 1, 2012

Today marks the official launch of Icon by Spigit. What is Icon?

The platform for fast, easy and powerful engagement with your crowd to gain insight.

Icon will deliver a completely different experience than anything you’ve seen. It employs a new voting mechanism, and game mechanics are part of its DNA. It’s pleasingly lightweight, and good for more than just ideas. Icon is built for employees to solve problems and get answers.

Oh, did I mention it’s free?

While using is believing (click here to get your company’s Icon), let’s highlight some of what makes Icon tick.

Simplicity is the new Powerful

Time was, the measure of software’s power was its number of features. The more the better, because that meant the application could do so much . Fast forward to the consumerization of enterprise software. What have we learned? That software that relies on social principles works better with a tight, focused feature set and a compelling user experience.

Icon is built to do these three things:

• Get solution-seeking challenges up and running fast
• Lightweight submission of responses
• Dynamic, real-time ranking of top submissions

The UI and the UX both reflect this focus. For example, look at the idea submission form. Overall number of fields is kept to a minimum, and only the idea title is required.

Notice also that insight requires an economy of expression. Character limits on the title and description necessitate focus on the core parts of the idea. The description is a text-only field, without the ornaments of HTML formatting.

For community members, this makes an idea quite consumable and ready for the new voting mechanism.

Pairwise comparisons elicit value judgments

Up-down votes and rating systems have become a pervasive part of our web experience. With Icon, participants are introduced to a new form of voting: pairwise comparison.

For each challenge, you are presented with two of the submitted ideas. Here’s an example:

You are asked to select the idea that you would rank higher, by clicking either ‘This’ or ‘That’. In keeping with the concepts of cognitive diversity, Icon is not prescriptive as to the basis of making a decision. Rather, people are free to use their own criteria for determining which idea ranks higher. The value here is accessing different perspectives, heuristics, knowledge and experiences of the crowd.

When done by a large number of individuals, these value decisions generate a ranking system for ideas. Icon also ensures that each idea gets multiple pairwise comparisons from the crowd, providing comprehensive coverage of all submitted ideas.

As comparisons are made, the ranking of ideas updates dynamically, in real-time. You can literally see rankings change as the crowd makes judgments about the different ideas. These dynamically changing rankings are part of the game mechanics that draw people to Icon.

Gamification spurs engagement and gets results

More and more, gamification is showing up in our online experiences, both on consumer sites and in enterprise software. Dachis Group’s Dion Hinchcliffe recently observed:

Although gamification can be successful without crowdsourcing, tapping into a diverse audience increases innovation, scalability, elasticity, and capacity of the gamified business process.

Key here, of course, is that gamification must be intelligently applied. Icon delivers game mechanics in a way that keeps participants coming back. Several of these gamification elements are described below.

Idea pairwise comparisons : Aside from being a mechanism for capturing value judgments, the pairwise comparison certainly brings a fun element to the voting process. You sit in judgment on two ideas, and make a call. And the dynamic updates to rankings as voting occurs bring to mind the real-time feedback one receives from a video game.

Front and center activity leaderboard : Integral to the experience is the Leaderboard. Each challenge, and the overall Icon site, shows the individuals who have contributed the most, via ideas, comments or votes. Points update in real-time, giving each person instant feedback on how much they are contributing to help answer different challenges.

Spend points to set up challenges : In Icon, it costs points to set up a new challenge. This has the effect of putting a value on a challenge, helping ensure the quality of a question asked of the community. Quora recently instituted a similar game mechanic. In addition, each challenge carries with it a specified payout. Top three ideas earn a level of points, as do the top three participants. The larger the “booty” associated to a challenge, the more incentive others have to participate.

Send gifts to other people : If someone does something that you find valuable or helpful, you can recognize that with a gift. Beside each person is a gift icon, which when clicked provides that person with an additional 10 points.

Not just for ideas

Here’s a quick way to distinguish invention vs. innovation:

Invention creates. Innovation changes.

In both cases, ideas are the core fuel. But Icon also works well with much smaller, less ambitious challenges that aren’t part of a company’s innovation efforts. For instance, Spigit CEO Paul Pluschkell posted a challenge asking in what location we should hold our customer summit. Not ideas in the innovation sense, but responses to a business question for sure.

While he could have done a survey, the problem there is that all the choices would need to be preset. This challenge allowed employees to come up with suggestions, and let them decide which ones were the best.

Think of Icon as a crowdsourced way to get answers.

Integrated with your existing Yammer network

Signing in to Icon is easy with your Yammer account. Both in initial registration and for all subsequent log-ins, you can simply click the Yammer icon. You confirm with Yammer that you give permission to Icon to use your Yammer credentials, and you’re on your way.

Dead simple.

Once you’ve established your Yammer credentials, several Icon activities are published into Yammer. In the main message feed, new challenges are posted. In the activity ticker, new submitted ideas and comments are published. This integration into your Yammer network expands the potential input that business challenges receive.

All of this is available for free. To get started, simply sign up for your company’s account here. Drop us a line, and let us know what you think.

Yammer Integration Gives 200,000 Enterprises Instant Access to ICON

PLEASANTON, CA–(Marketwire – May 1, 2012) – Spigit, the global leader in social innovation software and services, today announced the availability of ICON, a new crowdsourcing platform that gives employees a quick way to tap their co-workers for ideas, knowledge and feedback. ICON is available at no charge to employees and businesses, requiring only a corporate email address. ICON is also available through third party integration with Yammer.

As the leading social innovation platform provider for enterprises, Spigit currently serves more than 6M licensed users. ICON, the new people-powered solution, combines best practices and knowledge gained from delivering these solutions to the world’s leading global brands, and lets employees connect with their entire organization by posing questions and challenges. Here’s how it works:

• Solve questions that matter - any employee can pose a question or challenge and get immediate feedback from coworkers.
• Decide what’s hot and what’s not - contrary to typical voting mechanisms every idea in ICON gets equal assessment as coworkers and employees engage in a pair-wise comparison game of hot or not with comments on your idea. The solutions the crowd finds valuable then bubble to the top of the leaderboard.
• Give and you will receive – users can earn points and top leaderboard status by posting challenges, voting, commenting and “gifting.”

“ICON is addictive,” said Paul Pluschkell, CEO and founder of Spigit. “In the same time it takes to ask a co-worker what he thinks, you can ask your crowd and get better results.”

“Successful ideation campaigns are critical to driving innovation across an organization,” said Jim Patterson, chief product officer at Yammer. “By integrating ICON with Yammer, Spigit is connecting new ideas with a broad base of employees who touch all aspects of the business. Yammer provides the social context for these ideas to thrive.”

For Yammer users looking to take advantage of ICON, Spigit utilized Yammer’s open APIs to build this integration, which publishes activity stories such as new ideas, challenges, votes and comments in Yammer’s Ticker in real-time. Yammer users can also log into ICON via the Yammer Connect button, using their Yammer credentials to bring their Yammer identity, profile information and corporate social graph with them. If a user has not yet created a Yammer account, it will prompt them to do so.

ICON allows businesses to gain insight on the feasibility of crowdsourcing with innovation in mind and offers enterprises an easy upgrade path to SpigitEngage, a feature-rich social innovation platform. For more on ICON and the Yammer integration, visit icon.spigit.com or https://www.yammer.com/about/applications.

About Spigit
Diversity of insight is often the source of the most innovative solutions. Spigit is a platform that enables organizations to tap into the collective intelligence of employees, customers, partners and fans to help tackle business objectives.

By incorporating game mechanics, Spigit first engages your people at scale. Using social algorithms Spigit then leverages this crowd to do the heavy lifting and surface and vet the most promising ideas through collaboration. Finally, with big data analytics Spigit pinpoints actionable and predictive information that drives results.

The largest and most innovative companies in the world use Spigit including Overstock.com, AAA, US Bank, City of New York, Estee Lauder and Capgemini. For more information about how you can enable crowd innovation for your enterprise, visit www.Spigit.com, email info@spigit.com or call 1-855-SPIGIT1.

About Yammer
Yammer (www.yammer.com) is the leading provider of Enterprise Social Networks, enabling organizations to make transformative changes quickly by empowering employees to collaborate across departments, geographies, content and business applications. The basic version of Yammer is free, and customers can pay to upgrade their network to receive additional administrative and security controls, priority customer service and a dedicated customer success manager. Companies and organizations from across the globe, including more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500, are using our award-winning Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to improve employee productivity and engagement. Visit our blog to see how our customers are benefiting from Yammer.

Media Contacts:

• Sarah Borup
  SHIFT Communications
  617-779-1803
  spigit@shiftcomm.com
  
  Anne Lawrenson
  Spigit
  925-452-6519
  alawrenson@spigit.com

Copyright 2012 Marketwire, Inc., All rights reserved.

Caitlin Berens | Inc.com staff
April 23, 2012

Inc. 5000 Applicant of the Week, Spigit, helps companies curate employee ideas and feedback to create a better product or service

As applications for the 2012 Inc. 500|5000 arrive, we thought it would be worthwhile to shine a spotlight on some of the companies that are vying to appear on our ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. (For more information and to apply, click here). One that caught our eye was Pleasanton, California-based Spigit.

Paul Pluschkell has a passion for data. With a background in the financial market, including time as a CTO of a hedge fund and CTO of Reuters America, he understood the enormous amount of data out there, and knew that whoever could capture it the quickest and make decisions could usually beat the market.

Keeping that in mind, Pluschkell worked to brainstorm the next wave of communication. It was around this time that social networking was really gathering steam. “I know it seems old, but MySpace was really big, Facebook was coming on, and Twitter was starting early, there was all types of social information,” he says. “Everybody was saying that the problem was going to be how to filter this information.”

So in 2007, Pluschkell founded Spigit, a social software company focused on businesses, with an exemplifying name. “If you think of a spigot you can turn the tap to get all the flow or you can turn it to only get the important flow for what your needs are,” Pluschkell explains.

Simply put, Spigit is a social software business that connects the people who have the answers with the people who make decisions. The company uses a subscription-based business model to license their software, SpigitEngage, to businesses big and small. Businesses then utilize the cloud-based software by giving it to their employees. They post products, projects, and initiatives then their colleagues offer feedback. If someone gave great advice in the past then their opinion ranks higher and you see their feedback first. This makes it easy for executives to consider feedback when making decisions.

This unique way of filtering data, ranking feedback based on reputation, is one of the ways Spigit stands out in its market. So instead of an executive or someone else high up the chain of command spending countless hours looking at thousands of opinions in a jumble Spigit can provide them with the top 50 valuable ideas. This feedback can also be ranked by subject, category, level, and title, among other ways to suit the needs of the customer.

But, despite its promising business application, starting Spigit wasn’t easy. Pluschkell raised the money, had the idea, and put a small team together, including a market data expert, a technologist and java programmer, a trader, and a social sciences PhD from Berkley. But despite the expertise of his team, in the early stages of his start-up, people thought it was “a complete joke,” says Pluschkell.

“I went to 30 VCs and they said ‘there’s no business for this, there are social networking companies, blogs, wikis, and emails that will do this,’” Pluschkell says.

Despite a lack of initial business support, the entrepreneur stuck with his idea. “If everybody thinks it’s a good idea, then it’s probably already being done,” Pluschkell says. “So I think when you get the first obstacle and people say there’s no market for this it’s fantastic.”

Now peoples’ opinions on Spigit have changed. The company’s first four clients were AT&T, Wal-Mart, Lloyds Bank, and Pfizer. “It just turned out to be a real success,” Pluschkell says. “It’s not a typical start-up with four clients of that nature being your first clients. But that’s when we knew we had something real that people had to pay for.” According to Pluschkell, Wal-mart was able to make $78 million in profits in one quarter based on a single idea that originated using Spigit.

Today Spigit has 225 active customers and has sold 6.5 million licenses. And, with a three-year growth rate of 288%, the company plans to keep growing, especially with the launch of Spigit Icon, a freemium application that will provide users with quick answers from a business crowd, which will go live this month.

For 2011, the 121-employee company brought in about $10 million. Spigit’s projected 2012 revenue is $30 million. According to Pluschkell, the company has found success in every market they’ve entered. “We have an over 99% renewal rating on our software,” he says, “because once you get this information, you don’t want to be without it.”