Our team of innovation experts has put together best practices from launches to help you avoid common mistakes and increase innovation ROI.
Learn 11 reasons online challenges and company-wide collaboration are changing research and development for the better.
If you can’t answer these 12 questions, your company’s innovation program will not reach its full potential.
Innovation doesn’t have to be complicated, download this free roadmap for 15 steps to get your innovation efforts on the right track.
Learn how companies are delivering strong innovation ROI by collecting, prioritizing, and implementing actionable ideas more easily than ever.
Learn 5 ways crowdsourcing is changing the way businesses innovate and how you can take advantage of this emerging trend.
Learn how to overcome the challenges faced by innovation leaders and tips to expand and improve your company’s innovation program.
Plan and Implement an innovation workshop that provides an opportunity to engage your staff and a real return on their ideas.
Learn how we helped ExamOne reduce operational expenses by over 2% in 6 months.
Increasing employee engagement by 74% in 6 months according to McKinseys Organizational Health Index.
Calculate Ideawake's value from time savings, increased engagement, and more implemented ideas.
Innovation expert Mike Rodgers joins us for a discussion on why crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic can create market opportunities and how frontline innovation can help you capture that value.
Engaging over 3,000 front-line staff to reduce patient anxiety before, during, and after care takes place.
Discover 10 benefits that idea management software can deliver to your organization in the next 12 months.
Does buying a dedicated solution make sense, or would it be better to build it ourselves? Use our build vs. buy calculator to find out.
Disruption is one of the biggest challenges currently facing the health care industry. We've created this guide to better explain what disruption in the health care industry looks like and how to utilize innovation to beat it before competitors.
Learn seven strategies leading Health Care organizations are using to drive innovation, the tips you need, and actionable steps you can take to get a new innovation program up and running in your Health Care organization.
Learn how front-line innovation helped ProHealth transform their care model and patient experience.
Enabling employees to create, test, and pilot new products based on customer-driven validation.
Kennedys launches worldwide Ideas Lab to invent products to deliver modern legal services to clients.
Actionable steps you can copy and paste to effectively plan, promote, and run a digital ideation challenge with your employees that will result in a high engagement rate and produce measurable impact.
Ideawake CEO Coby Skonord and HeroX CEO Christian Cotichini talk about the benefits of internal and open innovation, especially when used in tangent.
We ran the world's biggest survey in 2021 on employee ideas and whether companies listen to them, and the results were shocking.
Project the Return on Investment you could achieve by investing in an employee ideation program. We base your results by taking the average of the innovation programs we're powering in over 39 countries and 185 cities.
Easily compare between idea management software and 5 alternatives like Teams, SharePoint, and Slack to help you determine which is best for your organization and use case.
A discussion on ways to empower women intrapreneurs in health care.
Learn how Sanford Health digitized their annual continuous improvement symposiums in a year where digital work became the norm, implementing employees' innovative ideas and saving hours of time in the process.
Learn best practices from programs we run in 39 countries and 185 cities on quickly launching a successful employee ideation program at your organization to stay ahead of the competition and increase employee engagement in 2021.
Successfully launching, scaling, and maintaining a bottom-up innovation program is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Avoid the 3 biggest mistakes organizations make with bottom-up innovation.
Three leading healthcare providers discuss how they transformed patient care by implementing a bottom-up innovation strategy.
Engaging over 100,000 front-line employees to discover, prioritize, and prototype innovative ideas to make the world a safer place.
As a result of COVID-19, organizations have had to adapt overnight to how their teams collaborate while slightly modifying to completely reinventing how their products and services are delivered. To adapt to this change more quickly, many companies have turned to digital ideation challenges to engage employees and their ideas to discover new ways to drive growth, increase efficiency, and better meet rapidly changing customer needs. During this session, Coby covered actionable steps you can copy and paste to effectively plan, promote, and run a digital ideation challenge with your employees that will result in a high engagement rate and produce measurable financial impact.
Mercury Marine engaged over 500 team members in engineering to openly ideate on a new product platform.
Pharmacy Chain Uses Empowerment of Middle Management and Prize Awarding to Collect 131 Ideas
Learn Why Companies Like Google are Crowdsourcing Productivity Ideas from 174,000 Employees Although cutting back on innovation and employee ideas are the last things an organization should do in times of economic uncertainty, it's often one of the first areas to get cut. Learn why companies like Google and Costco are increasing their focus on the ideas of frontline team members to identify millions in savings that can be quickly quantified to keep your program and job role a top priority in your organization over the next 12 - 18 months. Topics -5 examples of companies large and small crowdsourcing employee ideas to save millions while increasing efficiency -3 reasons it's critical to engage your staff and make them feel like they have a voice during times of uncertainty and layoffs -How to effectively measure impact on your program and communicate progress to leadership and frontline team members -A step-by-step playbook that you can use after the call to quickly put what you learn during our time together into action
5 Best Practices for Getting the Most Out of Innovation Challenges
Passionate about running innovation or improvement events at your organization but having trouble getting the buy-in from leadership? Whether it's due to priorities, the economy, or a lack of funding or resources, there will always be a reason not to say no. Learn how to present the true ROI of running these events and how to effectively pitch them to leadership to get your program off the ground in 2023.
Empowering Employees with the Tools, Training, and Resources Needed to Test and Validate Their Ideas.
Tapping Into the Wisdom of Frontline Team Members at Scale While Managing the Entire Innovation Lifecycle from One Platform
Tapping Into the Wisdom of Frontline Team Members to Create New Solutions and Deliver Value More Efficiently
Transforming Culture and Streamlining Operations at Paul Bunyan Communications
This release addresses improvements in printing PDFs, user experience, and improved visibility settings.
Theis release addresses bugs in the analytics page, better user experience when navigating stage changing and using tags.
This feature release addresses various bugs and feature requests regarding better user experience and flow on the platform.
Our most recent update includes updates to the analytics dropdown to make it visible to all users, making more challenge settings retroactive, and other small bug fixes.
Version 1.20.9 (December 20, 2024) addresses several issues, including fixing profile image saving, correcting analytics count mismatches, ensuring proper XLSX exports, removing third-party tracking, updating email configuration defaults, fixing dropdown prefixes, improving random sorting and saved view persistence, and refining deleted idea visibility with custom messages.
Version 1.3 (February 23, 2025) includes fixes for the 'Assignee' filter, added 'Save' and 'Cancel' buttons on the 'About' tab, 'Next' and 'Previous' buttons on the idea page, corrects issue with stage changes not updating the user tab, organizes community names alphabetically in the 'Go to' dropdown, improves idea page UX, resolves action item email redirect issues, enhances global search redirection, and corrects last login time in user list export.
This update brings key functionality improvements and bug fixes to the platform. The new export UX enhances consistency with a clearer download process, while the user list now displays active status for better management. We've also improved the experience for stage assignees with archived groups, ensuring smoother workflows. Admins can now search for any idea or stage in the global search, even if they aren't assigned to the submission. Plus, we've fixed various bugs, including the display of images in post updates and sorting/filtering options for tasks and milestones.
Ideawake Version 1.3, released May 5, 2025, includes key bug fixes and continuous delivery updates. Improvements include accurate last login formatting in user exports, corrected audience counts for targeted challenges, proper disabling of comments and replies, inclusion of numerical scores in individual evaluation exports, and restored visibility of completed evaluations after workflow stage changes. All updates have been tested and verified.
This update includes key bug fixes and improvements focused on mobile experience and workflow accuracy. Notifications and action items now open in mobile-friendly views, rule deletions in workflows function properly, and user status displays correctly. Decimal values are now recognized in custom fields, unsaved change popups no longer appear unnecessarily, and missing participation analytics in challenge modals have been added. Number formatting now correctly includes commas where applicable. All updates have been tested and verified. ✅
This release resolves several high-priority bugs and enhances platform flexibility and usability. Tag links in comments now return correct results, anonymity is properly handled on user profiles, and mobile navigation has been improved. Admins can now rename “challenges” platform-wide, and next/previous buttons function more smoothly. Updates also include improved notification messaging, default enablement of new submission digest emails, variable-based static text for language support, and the ability to disable attachments. All updates have been tested and verified.
This update includes several key fixes and enhancements. Exports now include start dates for stage and status changes, providing more visibility into submission timelines. Star ratings have been added as a trackable community action for leaderboard experience points. User status displays have been corrected so active users no longer appear as pending, and PDF exports now preserve proper text formatting in custom field responses. All changes have been tested and verified.
Ideawake’s v1.3 release delivers a high-level set of stability and usability improvements. The update fixes several core issues—such as inaccurate vote counts, AI settings not saving, and formatting problems in workflow notifications—while also enhancing the user experience with clickable attachments, improved filtering options, and cleaner display of usernames and custom fields. It also finalizes a more consistent system for how assignees are applied across communities and challenges. Overall, this release strengthens reliability, clarity, and ease of use across the platform.
Ideawake’s v1.3 release delivers a high-level set of stability and usability improvements. The update fixes several core issues—such as inaccurate vote counts, AI settings not saving, and formatting problems in workflow notifications—while also enhancing the user experience with clickable attachments, improved filtering options, and cleaner display of usernames and custom fields. It also finalizes a more consistent system for how assignees are applied across communities and challenges. Overall, this release strengthens reliability, clarity, and ease of use across the platform.
Ideawake’s August 2025 v1.3 update delivers a range of enhancements focused on data accessibility, usability, and smoother workflows across the platform. The release expands API capabilities by adding milestone and task data, strengthens reporting with new due-date filtering on bar charts, and fixes issues related to team member management, post-update targeting, and navigation from user profiles. User experience improvements include making all comments public by default, enabling customization of default field labels, and automatically assigning featured images to new ideas when none are uploaded. Export functionality has been improved to include key calculated custom fields, and button positioning within the idea modal has been refined for cleaner design. All updates were fully tested and verified.
Ideawake’s late-August v1.3 update focuses on improving platform reliability, streamlining workflows, and enhancing clarity across key user interactions. The release removes unnecessary HTML from activity logs, ensures action items behave consistently—displaying newest items first, auto-progressing correctly, and maintaining dropdown details when tasks are marked done—and aligns action-item counts across analytics and reports. User experience improvements include optimized idea search and navigation, corrected color dropdowns, intuitive role ordering on the invite page, and the ability to reorder prizes. Customization flexibility has been expanded with clear labeling of default vs. non-default fields and the option to remove attachments from submission forms. The update also replaces hard-coded text with customizable field names and fixes issues with empty custom fields. Overall, the release strengthens consistency, usability, and system stability, with all fixes tested and verified.
The September update to Ideawake v1.3 centers on smoothing out workflow interactions, improving data display, and enhancing customization across the platform. The release fixes formatting issues—such as long words breaking properly, description labels updating correctly, and special characters (like “&”) displaying as intended—and strengthens the reliability of workflow behaviors, including removing incorrect unsaved-change alerts and ensuring collaborators and default custom fields stay in sync. Users now have more flexibility with stage-change email notifications through added variable options, and platform visuals are improved with more relevant default featured images. Observers no longer see star ratings, and all workflows are now scrollable in the swimlane view. Overall, this update increases clarity, polish, and consistency throughout the user experience.
The October 1st Batch 40.7-CD release strengthens platform usability, visibility of user information, and reliability across key workflows. Major improvements include expanding the Refinement Tab to display richer context—such as updated stage progress, collapsible “About” details, collaborators, relationships, and comments—making refinement more informative and actionable. Data exports have been significantly enhanced: both user list and group CSV exports now include login activity, engagement metrics (comments, ideas, votes, points, rank), default profile fields, and all custom profile fields as individual columns. User profiles also now display group memberships directly in the “About” section for clearer visibility. On the bug-fix side, the release resolves several platform blockers: the Manage Users page now handles large provisioning files without freezing; anonymous posting settings behave correctly; custom field label updates sync instantly across stage settings; and embedding widgets no longer break when escape characters are used. Usability issues such as losing responses when navigating between ideas, right-click actions being disabled on ideas, and challenges failing to post in new communities have all been corrected. The embed widget’s UI toggles now function properly as well. Overall, this release improves stability, data accessibility, and user experience across the platform.
The 40.8-CD release focuses on improving overall user experience, tightening interface clarity, and resolving key issues across comments, reporting, and workflow functionality. Front- and back-end enhancements include clearer permission labels, improved navigation for admins, better hover guidance, and the ability to hide the activity feed at the post-type level. User mentions in comments now behave more reliably, making collaboration smoother. Several important bugs were fixed: comment visibility settings now work more consistently, custom dashboard reporting tools behave correctly, and pasted text in workflow notifications properly preserves line breaks. Users can now submit numeric custom fields using “0,” featured image behavior respects its on/off settings, and long custom field names no longer disable the “Create” button. Additional fixes ensure challenge admins can delete ideas when appropriate, and user profile initials display accurately. Overall, this release strengthens usability, data accuracy, and administrative control across the platform.
A shortlist of the most impactful tools we've found to help Innovation Teams maximize ROI and do more with less in 2025.
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The November 12th release focuses on strengthening platform reliability, improving admin control, and fixing several workflow and usability issues. Key enhancements include ensuring that featured images and anonymous submission settings stay aligned with admin choices, and adding sorting options (plus success messages) to the automations table to make it easier for admins to manage automations. Major bug fixes streamline the action-item review experience, prevent emails from being triggered for deleted ideas, and correct stage-change behavior so idea fields always match the newly selected refinement stage. The update restores the idea summary widget when additional challenge briefs are enabled, improves long file-name handling in custom upload fields, and resolves a bookmarking issue where the save button updated in the UI but failed at the API layer. Overall, this release boosts consistency, accuracy, and administrative usability across the platform.
The November 28 release delivers meaningful UX improvements, expanded admin flexibility, and key fixes that enhance overall platform stability. The automations page received a streamlined design—making paths clearer, edits more intuitive, and confirmations smoother. Admins can now manage custom fields more efficiently with inline editing, improved search, better option-value controls, and a new “save and continue” workflow for faster setup. Reporting tools were strengthened with corrected monthly goal calculations for counter gadgets and the ability to export results from user-based counter gadgets. Bug fixes further polish the experience: workflow alerts now behave correctly for admins, and long attachment names no longer break the interface. Overall, this update focuses on cleaner design, faster admin workflows, and more reliable reporting and UI behavior across the platform.
Release Summary — Dec 15, 2025 - Fixed UI and formatting issues (spelling, email spacing, & display). - Resolved bookmark and analytics accuracy issues. - Improved idea imports, especially for anonymous/blank submitters and featured images. - Added average scoring to scorecard criteria tables. - Enhanced PDF exports to include inline images, attachment links, and custom field uploads.
The 12/30/2025 release focuses on improved customization, navigation, and stability across the platform. Updates include replacing the universal loader with the community header logo, fixing challenge title navigation, restricting idea linking to admins and moderators, adding an editable “Multiple Replies to a Comment” email template, and providing clearer logo size guidance in appearance settings. Several bugs were resolved, including issues with Terms & Conditions customization, SFTP user provisioning, unsaved challenge setting changes, profile modal responsiveness, group list updates, and skeleton loader alignment—resulting in a smoother, more reliable user experience overall.
Ideawake Release Notes – Batch 41.3-CD (01/21/2026) introduces several platform enhancements focused on flexibility, usability, and localization, along with key bug fixes. This release improves SSO configuration by allowing multi-select group mappings, automates default email notification timing for new communities, updates standard email template images, and adds new admin-only sorting and filtering on the Manage Users page. Visibility was expanded to show who is following ideas and challenges, and Japanese language support was added at both the user profile and community levels. Additionally, multiple UI and data display bugs were resolved to ensure more accurate submitter information, cleaner idea pages, real-time updates when using quick edit, and a more stable, polished Jumbotron experience.
The 02/12/2026 release includes a range of UX improvements, automation enhancements, and bug fixes to streamline platform performance and admin workflows. Key updates include alphabetical sorting on the “manage emails” tab, improved user name display logic, a new Russian language option, and expanded workflow automations that allow admins to control idea editing by stage and automate challenge changes. The flatfile upgrade introduces AI-powered field mapping, validation error highlighting, and improved bulk imports. Milestones and subtasks now appear in default idea table columns, workflow cloning preserves stage order, and admin view preferences (such as viewing 100 users) now persist. Additional UX improvements were made to the challenge homepage and embed form setup. Bug fixes addressed activity log formatting, profile initial updates, accurate Kanban idea counts, and real-time filter updates without requiring page refresh.
This release includes several usability improvements, new reporting and table features, and bug fixes to enhance the platform experience. Key updates include the addition of a “Most Recent Comment” column, new sorting and pagination options for Action Items, and additional columns available in the ideas list and export files. Workflows are now alphabetized across the platform, and users can now clear star ratings with a cancel option. Minor UX improvements were also made, including clearer “no results returned” messages, improved dashboard reordering behavior, and removal of extra whitespace in dropdown fields. Several bugs were also resolved, including fixes to workflow filtering updates, challenge update post images, and the “I Voted For,” “Saved by Me,” and “I’m Following” filters. Additional fixes ensure feature image settings reflect correctly and that proper error messages appear when saving a “No Action” stage in workflows. Overall, the update improves usability, reporting capabilities, and platform reliability.
The March 30th, 2026 release includes several feature enhancements, UX improvements, and bug fixes aimed at improving usability and data accuracy. Key updates include adding “no results returned” messages in filters and column settings, new sorting and pagination options for action items, and a “Most Recent Comment” column in the ideas list. Workflows are now alphabetized, users can remove star ratings, and additional columns have been added to idea tables and exports. The dashboard behavior has been updated to align with the latest Angular version, and UI spacing issues have been cleaned up. Bug fixes address workflow filters not refreshing properly, image upload/display issues, and previously broken filters like “I voted for” and “I’m Following,” along with improvements to feature image settings and clearer error messaging for workflow actions.
The 04/15/2026 release introduces several usability improvements and bug fixes across the platform. Key updates include adding a required-field asterisk to submission titles, a new “Edit Prize” button for easier prize management, and a configurable “Accept Invite” email template. Numerous bugs were resolved, such as fixing PDF preview loading issues, correcting idea import column mapping, ensuring images persist in draft submissions, and improving redirect behavior so shared links open the correct idea modal. Enhancements were also made to time series functionality with date filtering and adjustable time periods, along with standardized export labels and elimination of duplicate data in PDF exports. Additional fixes improve admin permissions, challenge updates for targeted users, and overall system performance and consistency.
The April 29, 2026 release introduces several usability improvements and bug fixes across the platform. Key updates include better handling of long text in multi-select fields, an interactive three-dot menu on the PDF preview page, and improved loading feedback with a skeleton loader and “no results” messaging on the Pending Invites page. User management has been enhanced with a new “Active Users” tab and optimized search functionality that delivers more accurate results even during rapid input. Additional features include support for MailTo links in custom navigation and the ability to create new custom fields inline during the Flatfile import process. Bug fixes address discrepancies in idea counts for private challenges, ensure full user profile data is included in exports, and improve the stability of the “reply to comment” modal so it no longer closes unexpectedly when clicking outside of it.
