Innovation Cockpit

We present the design of a dashboard for facilitators in Idea Management Systems (IMS), an emerging class of collaborative software for business organizations or local geographic communities. In these systems, users can generate, share, judge, refine, and select ideas as part of a grassroots process. However, a class of users that lacks adequate support in current IMS are the facilitators. Their role is to help the best ideas to emerge and grow, while balancing the judgments of the crowd with those of the managers or the community leaders. We show how the dashboard helps facilitators in making more efficient and effective decisions in situations where the selection and judgment become prohibitively lengthy and time consuming.

We present the design of a dashboard for facilitators in Idea Management Systems (IMS). IMS are an emerging class of collaborative software tools aimed at business organizations or local geographic communities. Through these systems users can generate, share, judge, refine, and select ideas as part of a grassroots process. However, a class of users that is lacking adequate support in current IMS are the facilitators. Their role is to help the best ideas to emerge and grow, while balancing the judgments of the crowd with those of the managers or the community leaders. In this paper we point to the unmet needs of these users, describe the design of a system prototype, and the evaluation of a first version of this prototype to test our design.