We were moving away from a manual approach of capturing ideas and using a more systematic approach. Since we also already had the other Planview suite of tools, we figured it was best to continue with them. Elements from our project management system were integrated into Spigit and they were able to help us get set up and going pretty quickly as needed. The Planview Spigit system was implemented globally within our company, but mostly within the R&D department. We are still looking to see in what other ways we can use it with other departments.
Pros
Crowdsourcing
Idea capture
Reporting/Analytics
Idea collaboration
Idea analysis
Cons
User friendly interface.
Organize the administrative settings to be easier to use.
Clearer indication on what settings do what.
Be able to customize it even more.
Likelihood to Recommend
Planview Spigit is best suited for capturing ideas and processing them for acceptance (or in our case, successful transition from idea to project). It might not be best suited for survey type of activities or capturing generic information. For example, if we wanted to check with all associates if they prefer t-shirts or water bottles as swag, or if they can communicate to us about a safety issue.
VU
Verified User
Analyst in Corporate (Chemicals company, 1001-5000 employees)
Spigit is used in an innovation department to support innovation/crowdsourcing within the company. We use it for crowdsourcing of ideas, brainstorming, and problem solving.
Pros
Crowdsourcing.
Innovation.
Problem solving.
Cons
Connect the store to online stores in order to automatize the deliveries of rewards.
Improve collaboration possibilities between people.
Likelihood to Recommend
Spigit is very good to "industrialize" a crowdsourcing campaign in a big company. You can launch a campaign very rapidly.
Spigit is currently being used by one department for two purposes: the generation of ideas, and the management of ideas. We have launched two challenges to develop new product concepts, and we have also built out a separate component of Spigit to serve as a repository of ideas that are being considered for commercialization.
Pros
Spigit is extrememly simple to use - it has a very intuitive UI for users involved in a challenge.
Spigit provides clear visibility ideas that are in the pipeline, and which ideas have progressed through various stages.
Spigit provides a very flexible tool for the creation of new challenges.
Cons
We would like to see more robust reporting functionality, ideally integrated within the tool as opposed to passing through to a separate platform.
Likelihood to Recommend
Spigit is an extremely valuable crowd sourcing tool. The interactive nature of the tool provides a very good platform for engaging users and encouraging dialogue among the user community. This leads to the development of a cohesive, well considered concept.
VU
Verified User
Team Lead in Information Technology (Food & Beverages company, 5001-10,000 employees)
We use Spigit in multiple instances or communities. Our biggest community spans engineering, product management/marketing, research, and parts of manufacturing for our consumer electronics division, all working on new product features and ideas for our headphones, music speakers, home theater systems, etc. Our most active community at the moment is the one for our retail salespeople, which is focused on operational improvements -- what selling techniques work best, what merchandising has been successful, and so on. We've also had temporary communities for cross-functional teams of a few dozen people working on special projects.
Pros
Idea Submission: This is the bread and butter, and it's fairly easy to customize a template for idea input to make it work for your organization.
Idea Progression: There is a lot of criteria on which you can trigger the progress for an idea, and it's very easy to configure.
User Reputations: Weighting the value of each user's input based on the past perceived value of his/her input works well and is pretty useful, both in the core functionality (submitting and evaluating ideas) but also in helping us identify power users.
Responsiveness to Customer Needs: We've definitely seen features added that we specifically requested. They use their own tool within their user community to help them identify and prioritize product improvements.
Events and Conventions: The Spigit user events (the Ignite summit in particular) have always been high quality and a great help to energize and inspire their community managers and customers.
Cons
Detailed Idea Evaluation: It's difficult to do things like expert reviews or specific topical reviews, or to rate ideas by multiple criteria. The built-in visualizations for comparing ideas against each other don't make use of the granularity available in the data, and are mostly useless.
Custom Reports: In six years, they're now on their third platform for custom reports. This is important, because their built-in reporting and leaderboards don't track the kind of metrics we want to track. The first reporting system was a complex scripting language that was powerful, but still limited in some respects, and required paid custom work by Spigit employees if you needed high-powered reports that required extensive knowledge of their internal database schema! And still, it had limitations. The second reporting system was a sort of cross-tab dashboard tool that never worked the way I thought it would, and couldn't show the things I wanted anyway. The new tool seems to be a much-improved dashboard-style tool, but it has a bit of a learning curve that we haven't taken the time to climb yet.
Site Design and Customization: If you don't pay them for custom work, and you don't like the default pages, you're in for a lot of frustration and helplessness, as their widget system features hundreds of obscurely-named widgets with unhelpful documentation pages.
Page-Level Analytics: We have a private site for confidentiality reasons, and we have no idea about how our customers use the site to be able to improve their experience or identify what's working. The platform has no built-in page analytics tools like Omniture, Google Analytics, etc. And we can't use them on a private site because there's no way to get past password protection.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a community with more than 100 active users, and you're looking for ideas around operational improvements that can be acted on in a 6-12 month window, Spigit will work great, and it's one of the best options out there. If you're trying to customize the platform much, you should plan on paying Spigit's service group to do that for you, because it's not easy to do yourself. If you're looking for ideas that will take more than about a year to implement, Spigit is as good as anyone else because that's a really tough thing to do in an innovation community!
Spigit was used in one organization, it focused around allowing different groups to collaborate on a specific problem. Most people used it as a way to gather different ideas for a problem their own group had. We also used it as follow up for conferences.
Pros
Gathering ideas
Filtering ideas
Selecting a winner
Cons
Some of the graduating criteria were not well defined, or caused confusion. Example - Vote count and approval rating.
Some of the new functionality came in the form of paid modules, not cool.
The sales rep didn´t care about the relationship.
Likelihood to Recommend
Spigit is most appropriate for questions that can be solved in many different ways, and don't require a lot of knowledge.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Engineering (Automotive company, 10,001+ employees)
