Welcome SAP's new idea crowdsourcing site
As my colleague Idea Place launching at the Innovation campus during SAPPHIRE before SAPPHIRE NOW, a new idea crowdsourcing tool launched during last week's event at the Innovation Campus. I'm pleased to share that the beta version of Idea Place is now open for the community and wider ecosystem to search, submit, comment and vote on ideas to enhance SAP's future.
Today, there are many ways to share ideas with SAP, be it via on-site meetings or influence councils and focus groups, just to name a few. These historic methods are tried-and-true but leave some opportunities open in today's social innovation world. For example, how can we collect feedback from thousands? How can we empower customers, partners and the greater ecosystem to collaborate on feedback? And finally, how can we ensure the appropriate SAP solution manager or other owner can respond and take action on the potential mass of feedback?
Please welcome Idea Place - http://ideas.sap.com/
Idea Place is a step change in the way SAP solicits feedback from customers, partners and the greater ecosystem. It is an open, crowd-based, collaborative way to embrace ideas and feedback from the ecosystem to help improve SAP's products, processes and solutions.
Let's get into some of the actions
Idea Place is a straightforward interface, primarily designed to make the process of submitting ideas and feedback as simple as possible. There are several ways to participate, including submitting new ideas, commenting on existing ideas, voting and watching via notifications.
As a new user, search for your topic or idea of interest. Searching will provide the opportunity to discover ideas similar to your own. If you find an idea you like, then raise the popularity by voting it up. Voting will help identify the priority of an idea within a topic as established by the community and help set expectations on what features are deemed important. This brings a unique qualitative measure to feedback and ideas not possible with typical enhancement systems or forums.
Now let's say you find an idea that is similar to yours. Do you create a new one and risk the community splitting their votes? Perhaps it is worth adding a comment to the existing one. A comment can extend an idea's scope or value. The stronger the case for an idea, the better chance it has of being prioritized and possibly being implemented.
After searching, if you are unable to find your favorite idea, then here's your chance to create a new one. Submitting an idea on Idea Place is as easy as selecting a topic, filling in a title and description and clicking 'Create Idea'. Make sure to provide clear and concise descriptions as the community will be more likely to reward your ideas with votes.
And finally, a subtle but critical piece, is notifications. After finding or creating an idea, simply 'select, receive email notifications' to keep up to date on commenting activity and the status of the idea.
Take a Quick Tour
For a 90 second intro to the site, check out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHt9AGnICK4&hd=1
Benefits to SAP ecosystem
As SAP pushes forward to be a more innovative company, it is clear that these innovations do not come solely from within the organization's walls. Customer-centric innovation accelerates maturity and usability of products and solutions by SAP and by the ecosystem. Taking this activity to the next level requires opening communication channels to a greater breadth of users and allowing the ecosystem to elaborate on ideas and help identify the priority of any ideas or feedback.
SAP has been listening. By addressing the specific areas above, Idea Place provides a stronger voice to the customer and the greater ecosystem. This will not only provide an opportunity for feedback at all stages of the product development lifecycle but will also be able to touch all levels of the product development organization.
And SAP has been listening in other areas too. The SAP Community Network forums are very active with many ideas and good deep discussions. Unfortunately, these inspired activities have no organized way to be attached to a topic or gain visibility in a greater context than the forums. Besides being difficult for the community to track feedback and ideas, it also makes the task extremely demanding for the solution manager. By providing a centralized area for ideas and feedback to be discussed, it will be possible to access ideas around a topic in a more scalable way.
Finally, Idea Place has taken a page from the feedback of using enhancement systems. Though Idea Place is not meant to be a replacement, it does provide a way for the ecosystem to bring visibility to feedback and ideas that may have been aging in a system somewhere before.
Solution from Partners and the Community
I've referenced SAP solution managers as one audience for submissions to Idea Place, but there is no governance that solutions to feedback can only be provided by SAP. Idea Place is open to the ecosystem to encourage addressing feedback and ideas in a collaborative way - in fact, partners are encouraged to comment on ideas for which they have already developed solutions. A niche feature may never be part of the formal SAP product or solution and if a partner has a solution to solve a customer's burning need in a timely fashion, then all the better to let interested parties know. The community itself can provide solutions as well, with code-sharing projects like Code Exchange or even just some basic details on how to solve a problem.
Idea Philosophy
One failing of many enhancement systems is that idea submitters receive little to no feedback on their submissions and thus lose faith in the system itself. Therefore, we believe it is critically important to only on-board solution and other managers that can monitor their respective topics. This is why not all SAP products, solutions and services will be available immediately. Idea Place will contain a small set to start and will add more and more topics and teams over time. So if you have an idea and your product or solution is not available, then let us know the topic area. https://ideas.sap.com/community/community_and_services/idea_place_proposed_idea_sessions
If the topic is already there, vote it up and help the Idea Place team build a stronger case for on-boarding the respective SAP teams.
Pilot to run for 2010
Idea Place (Beta), is a pilot project, starting with some topic areas from CRM, EPM, Imagineering and SCN. Over the months, as momentum builds on the site more topics will be added. It will be critical that the site is adopted and used to ensure the site provides a continued benefit to the community and SAP. Please help make Idea Place a success by submitting ideas, commenting or voting for your favorite: http://ideas.sap.com/
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