The metric we follow most closely at Betterific is how many ideas the client receives vs how many ideas they identify as “research worthy.”  For this last challenge, the kitchen cabinet dead space innovation challenge,  we had 65 total submissions.  14 of them were determined “research worthy.”  That’s a 21.5% hit rate.  Absolutely incredible.

When we talked to the client afterwards they told us the main value prop of Betterific is that our community of sorcerers (crowd-sourceres, that it is) is highly ingenius, capable and thorough.  And that the hit ratio is unlike anything they’ve ever seen.  They’ve tried other crowdsourcing solution platforms, but the hit ratio for our competitors is usually around 5-6%.  So when they look at time spent vs output, the Betterific community and process is highly efficient and productive.

And now for our winners and top ideas!

Every business tries to teach its employees how to think like an owner.  So they create processes, systems, guides, trainings and incentives around it.  But there are just some things you can’t teach.

We are looking at use a survey platform for an upcoming project, and one of the requirements is somewhat abnormal.  We need to base the last question of the survey on the user’s generated answer to the previous question.

I reached out to two survey/form providers to see how we should approach this conundrum.

In one, I received a really welcoming, engaging, and helpful response, from a customer service representative.  You could tell the the representative wished they could help.  That he believes in his brand and that he believes that one day they will build a feature to solve my design challenge.  But at the end of the day the answer was, “No.”

The second email I received, from a different provider, explained to me that, although the tool wasn’t built to do that,  but if you ask the question in a different way, we could arrive at the outcome we were looking for.  Ultimately, she found a creative way to say yes.

That’s what owners do. They think outside the box, stretch boundaries and create new realities.

We just wrapped up a fascinating private innovation challenge around ways credit card companies can WOW their cardholders.

(We updated this blog post to include our winners!)

Over 190 unique ideas were submitted.  Which was way over our estimates!  Thanks for participating.  Since we just returned from the credit card company, we thought we’d report back some of the findings.

The most interesting theme that popped up was around subscription services – and how credit card companies can help surface them, manage them and make it easier to end them.

Another interesting area of interest was around how to make it easier for small businesses to easily track and manage expenses.  And with AI on its way, people were looking for ways the credit card company could bring AI into product recommendations, savings and notifications.

So what’s the next step for the brand?  Concept development.  Which requires some massaging from the first phase of idea generation.  Taking a step back – surfacing themes, pairing ideas together, combining ideas and coming up with new ideas.  Understanding the need states of card holders and matching them up with the ideas (and brainstorming new ones when necessary).  And looking at ideas that can have the largest impact.

The overriding question they’ll be asking is – Will a cardholder switch over for this benefit?  Or, how can we combine a few ideas to make this a “must-have” benefit.

The next phase will be concept validation.  Then testing and roll out.

Thanks for participating!  We hope this was helpful and shed some lights on “the day after the challenge.”

Congratulations to our innovation challenge winners!  The grand prize winner is Dennis Pitcock!  Runner Ups were: Eric Cronert, Karen Hold, Luc Michaud, Luke Bornheimer and Thomas Williams.

We just launched a new crowdsourcing innovation challenge with a financial institution to help dream up brilliant new ideas for a credit card company to wow its cardholders.

What’s your idea? http://credit.betterific.com

Already close to 150 ideas.  Lots of creativity brewing.  Sometimes you just need to engage your stakeholders! Kudos to this brand for going out to the crowd, to our memberbase of design thinkers, idea enthusiasts and brainstormers.

Betterific Nation,

Just wanted to give you a bit of a sneak peak on a new innovation product we’re working on.

The Betterific platform helps brands co-create new concepts with our memberbase of design thinkers and ideation enthusiasts.  Our first product was our ideation and brainstorming product, which connects our members with each other over new and innovative ideas.  We then added a layer on top – the innovation challenge, where brands can sponsor ideation sessions.  Our second product was concept refinement.  We added an illustrator to the team and are helping bring the ideas to life.  These concepts are sketched up and then brought to the Betterific community for refinement.  Along the way, we’ve added design thinking services, to help brands better navigate the process and guide them through the user-centered approach to launching new products and services.

Brands have continued to ask us a simple question – once the ideas are generated, where/how can I collaborate with my team over the evaluation and execution of these ideas?  We’ve spent the last three months thinking through, prototyping, co-creating with our customers, and building a place for this collaboration to happen.  We call it Workflow.  See below for some screenshots.  We’d love your feedback.  Our goal is to roll this out by the end of May.  Thanks!

In this dynamic screenshot, we show the main list view.  Purpose =Make sense of all the ideas, by adding themes, and move them through  the innovation process by assigning statuses.  

The purpose of this stage is to quickly evaluate ideas – each company can change the criteria to whatever they like, but the concept is the same.  Collaboratively evaluate the feasibility (cost, difficulty…) and impact of an idea, and flag your favorites, so you can determine as a team which ideas should move through.

For a more in depth view of an idea, you click into the idea page itself.  Each expert invited to evaluate the idea can rate the idea, add their own notes and collaborate in the private comments section.  Any individual can then click through the evaluations to see both aggregate and criteria-level evaluations.

We just received a wonderful email from one of our members.  She loves the Betterific community, finds tremendous value in the brainstorming and connection with other members and companies.

In the spirit of Betterific, She has some innovative suggestions!  And we’re implementing her ideas immediately (see below).  She’s encouraging us to think through rewards beyond our current roster of incentives.

With our crowdsourcing, design-thinking innovation challenges, here is the rewards that winners get:

-(1) Grand prize wins between $350-500. (4-5) Runners Up win between $25-50

-We inform the winners which of their ideas performed best and why.  We let them know how the clients reacted and why.

-The grand prize winner gets featured our blog, in an interview where they talk about where they find their creative genius.

The Betterific member suggested we endorse them on LinkedIn for Design thinking, ideation and brainstorming. Great idea!  We are implementing that idea immediately.  If you have other ideas for incentives, we’re listening.