CorasWorks

Integrate your Innovation Portal into the look and feel of your organization. Change the styling with fully customizable CSS; add, edit and delete menu items; add a company logo and other graphics; and more.

Chances are you’ll want to capture ideas on multiple business areas and objectives.  Set up standing Communities and event-driven Campaigns, Challenges, and Contests. Users see a listing of ideas and can find them by search, tag taxonomy, tag cloud, and date as shown below.  They can subscribe to notification feeds for the full community, by Author, by Tag or for an individual idea.

Post ideas to the Communities and make then as detailed as you’d like. Make your objectives, goals, and important points visible so other community members can quickly sum up what makes your idea special. Format text with a fully-featured rich text editor, upload images and documents, and post links to URLs. Give your ideas visibility through tags.

Dig into the details of an idea.  See the full write-up, review all comments and associated documents.  Track the status. And participate by rating, commenting, and uploading files that enhance the idea.

Now that the ideas are posted, let the community come in and rate, comment and enhance those ideas. Ideas are ranked using our Star Power feature.  Add your comments to the idea or comment on other comments. 

Watch ideas move up and down the ranking with the Top 10 Lists. Take an at-a-glance look at the hottest ideas by Star Power and Most Recent ideas in each community. One click to pop-up the Idea Details.

See the activity for multiple communities in a dashboard.  Use the “Pie Picker” to switch between communities.  See total ideas across communities, activity over the last 30 days, and the status and category breakdowns for each community.

Keep those campaigns and challenges energized by posting news.  Use group blogs to spread the word about upcoming challenges and other information. Give plenty of visibility to rewards and recognition to idea participants.

Manage the full life cycle of innovations—from the original idea, through the review process, and into downstream activities. Kick off your process by screening ideas from your portfolio of idea communities as shown here and submitting them to the review process. You can have separate management hubs for different scenarios that are tailored to your process. 

Customize your hub to have the stages and gates you want for a given scenario.  Items are moved forward with customizable actions that automate the workflow and notifications.

The review feature makes it easy to quickly review multiple items.  Set up your customized review forms for use with different types of ideas. Capture quantitative or qualitative information used for prioritization.

Depending on your process, a number of other teams may need to be engaged in supporting activities. From the management hub, assign tasks to these teams working in separate collaborative team sites. From there, they can manage their work and interact with the innovation team and the original idea contributor.

Your community ranked them, your team reviewed them, others worked them, now management needs to formally vote and make decisions about whether to move the ideas forward or not. The votes and user are shown and you can add comments. Final decisions are recorded with automatic notifications to contributors, sponsors, and assignees.

Ideas that are approved for development or implementation move into the innovation portfolio. Here, you can filter, search and group by numerous fields and then drive the next steps through a customizable actions menu: kickstart downstream activities, push to specific teams, and more.

Your business processes are different for teams handling different types of ideas.  And, your processes change.  The point-and-click customization wizards empower business users to update forms, notifications, stage-gate workflow and many other common actions.  Below we show the wizards for customizing an email notification action and a stage-gate workflow action.

Each hub has its own management options.  Manage the portfolio of idea communities you will work with and the portfolio of external supporting and downstream activities you will integrate with.  You also have more extensive options to manage the innovations in process and post news such as recognition.

When you've approved an innovation, what’s the next step?  Driving downstream execution with customizable actions.  Below we show a user submitting an innovation to the Program Management Office to kick off a development project and an implementation task being assigned to a team. 

Implementation teams can each have their own site to manage those tasks that have been assigned to them for implementation.  They can review the original innovation and interact with the innovation team as shown below.  And see the original idea and associated information and interact with the original contributor.

We work natively with most project management systems that run on SharePoint, including the CorasWorks Project Portfolio Management solution.  Our solution integrates with Microsoft Project Server, native SharePoint project sites, and 3rd party project systems through our customizable workstream actions.

Get started with standard, out-of-the-box reports for ideas and innovations in process. Business users can use the Pivot Chart Wizard with more than 40 chart types to customize reports to get exactly the perspective they need.  For more advanced reporting, use our customizable flash-based charting and integration with SharePoint Excel Services and Reporting Services.