I had the opportunity to speak with Matt Greeley recently, the CEO of Brightidea, which the company’s literature positions as “on-demand innovation pipeline management.” That description makes innovation sound like plumbing in a factory instead of the somewhat ineffable, creative, artistic sense we usually cast innovation in. And that’s one of the important ideas behind Brightidea: that innovation isn’t some rarefied activity limited to a small cadre of brainiacs. On the contrary, there are understandable patterns and repeatable patterns, especially when you look at swarms of people involved in large-scale innovation, which is the sole domain of Brightidea: working with very large companies on very broad spectrum innovation efforts and involving thousands of participants.

On the social level, Brightidea is a good example of a functionally specialized tool employing now dominant social motifs like activity streams and following. I am a big believer in best-of-breed solutions, and that lines up with the company’s approach as well.

I learned from Greeley that R&D is a $1.3 trillion per year market and still growing 5 percent. Greeley believes that large-scale crowdsourcing is the coming disruptive wave for innovation and could carve off a large slice of this sector.

The company has three complementary tools. As its website says:

• WebStorm lets you create employee and customer online innovation communities with one click for launch to gather and collaborate on ideas.
• Switchboard facilitates managing and merging ideas into proposals and proposal development through private collaboration rooms and multiround scorecarding.
• Pipeline delivers social project management through “Facebook-style” project fan pages and flexible workflows.

Here’s a Webstorm for the mythical Artemis Industries, where a number of innovation challenges have been posted:

Here’s a zoom into the “next-generation workstation” challenge, which has a Kickstarterish feel with a countdown timer, the faces of various participants and those creating the challenge, and buttons to allow the user to participate by creating ideas of voting on others’ ideas:

And here you can see a user’s activity stream, showing activity from challenges and people of interest:

The bottom line

Brightidea is a leader in the new era of crowdsourced large-scale innovation, with well-proven technology that meets the needs of very large companies like GE, Panasonic, and Motorola, and builds strong traction with merely large companies as well, like Autoliv, Nielsen, and Humana, which Greeley said was a focal area for 2013 sales. I think that tightly focused apps that implement a well-defined use case — like crowdsourced innovation — are the future of social business, and Brightidea is one of the companies leading that wave.