Inogate continues to impress the industry

Inogate @ Forrester Report

Inogate is growing their idea management software market space worldwide. According to the latest Forrester Research report published on August 3rd 2010, Inogate has been nominated as one of the two emerging European idea management software providers.

With offices in Portugal, Spain and the newly opened office in the UK, Inogate is continuing to impress the industry and simplify the way their clients innovate by advancing their Enterprise Collaborative 2.0 solutions.

By focusing on advanced semantics, dynamic profiles and artificial intelligence capabilities, Inogate’s solutions can simply bridge clients’ organizational silos, boost creativity and promote innovation culture throughout the entire organization.

To access the mentioned report, please go to: http://bit.ly/asI4VK

Exploring the right way to innovation

In today’s fast-paced market companies are constantly looking for new ways to find original ideas and concepts that will ensure market success in today’s consumption culture. In the era of social media, information overload and sleepless communication – how do you know you are doing the right thing? Choosing the right tool and cutting innovation costs? Building an innovation culture and putting the culture into practice?

The answer is simple. What you really need to see and understand is what you have in front of you – because your employees can make it happen. You just need to engage them! We believe that every human-centric business process must evolve and become an innovation process. Also, the practice must combine the speed and flexibility of unstructured creativity with the discipline of structured control to respond flexibly to changing business conditions. There should be a strong focus on people, their challenges and goals – something that evolve on a daily basis.  The practice needs to be designed for people but build for change.

Looking at the different solutions out there in the marketplace – there are extremely many tools that are mainly focusing on generic capabilities. They all have web 2.0 tools such as blogs, forums, social networks, wikis and so on – but is it really these tools that will make innovation happen? No, the key to successful innovation is to have a strong focus on specific business processes and cover a broad range of user groups and mix several Web 2.0 capabilities organized towards a specific business purpose.  The process will then empower individual users and transform groups and departments into highly efficient entities capable of constantly optimizing their performance trough innovation. And the rest comes by it self, simple! No more worries! Innovation will be stimulated and promoted everywhere and you will continuingly and efficiently bring great ideas into life and market.

Inogate at the XXII ISPIM Conference | Bilbao

We arrive in Bilbao after just a short journey and have to say the countryside is beautiful. Rolling green hills and swiss-style houses that you wouldn’t expect to see in Spain however we are in Basque Country in the North where they get lots of rain.

After taking some time to explore the city we attend the cocktail reception at the Atrio del Edificio Ensanche on behalf of Bilbao Tourism and also listened to a speech from the Deputy Mayor where he thanked us all for coming and mentioned that Bilbao is at the forefront of innovation. ISPIM has been running events for years so it was so nice to see people who had kept in contact since their last meetings hugging and happy to see each other. What a friendly bunch of people!

This event is not your normal conference where only companies come to speak about their innovation strategy’s but it also welcomes Professors and University’s from around the world so we got to hear some very interesting perspectives from the world of academia.

Day 1 began with the Keynote Speakers Prof. Joe Tidd, Matt Kingdon and Jon Azua discussing lean innovation and co-creative innovative value then later after lunch many parallel sessions which really gave covered everything from Open Innovation, Business Models to Measurement & Performance and training People in Innovation. So Day 1 was packed with information. One comment from Kaheel Mailk from the University of Manchester really summed up how we think about innovation, “trust is a key component”. So true!

Later we were off to the Guggenheim Musuem for a private viewing of the collections and then a Gala dinner in the actual museum’s Atrium, we felt very lucky so to be in such a terrific building. One of the collections Anish Kapoor was terrific with wonderful sculptures and colours. (Although not being an art buff myself I’m not sure if you could call them sculptures!) Have a look at the website and let me know your thoughts on the Anish Kapoor collection. http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/index.php?idioma=es

After a good nights sleep we are back at the event where all day we have sessions running. The parallel sessions that we enjoyed a lot were Open Innovation & Collaboration and Customers. We heard from Christina Oberg in the afternoon who talked about customer roles in innovations. Christina said that innovation must be customer driven and by doing this they get free knowledge on how to improve their products. This is certainly something we have embedded in our process otherwise you never meet the needs of your customers. One such other comment was made by Beatriz Lara from BBVA, Beatriz said “customers rule” get over it!

So after another whirlwind day we are again taken out to a fabulous place for dinner. A Basque evening at the Azurmendi Restaurant and a tour round the Txakoli Wine Cellar. We were greeted at the door with glasses of Txakoli (white wine famous to that region) given a quick tour and then whisked upstairs to enjoy a lovely meal and live band. Once the drink started flowing everyone was on the dance floor for many hours and I’m sure a lot of people did not want the evening to end. We didn’t….

We would like to thank the Iain Bitran, Stephen Koen and the rest of the Board of ISPIM for such a wonderful event. They really did find a great balance between attending a conference and having fun. We loved all the interesting places in Bilbao we got to visit (we took around 200 photos!) so have a look on Inogate Facebook.

Inogate at the Intranet & Portals Conference | Amsterdam

After arriving to a very cloudy Amsterdam on the Wednesday afternoon, we were excited to see what the city had to offer. Canals, cyclists, coffee shops were surrounding us when we were walking the busy streets of Amsterdam. I almost got run over by a cyclist – luckily I survived thanks to Francisco that had his eyes on every cyclist in town.

Indeed we live in an era of social networking! We had a few drinks in a busy pub close to the popular Dam square where we suddenly started chatting with Ricardo, a Brazilian/Canadian engineer and patent holder. Many great ideas and stories were discussed over a couple of Heinekens and we are excited to meet Ricardo again, very soon in sunny Portugal this time.

Thursday and Friday – time for the event! The two days brought interesting perspectives on how social media presents a radical shift for organizations. It is important to see social networking as a journey and understanding that the cultural change will not happen over a night. In fact, it is crucial to be flexible and to be prepared for working with different generations as well as getting ready for the realities of participation. We will always have creators, contributors, browsers and couch potato’s within our network. But we must say – it is not all about engaging and studying employees – we must think beyond that. As we are coming from pure innovation we feel that we also have to focus on specific business processes and cover a broad range of user groups and mix several Web 2.0 capabilities organized towards a specific business purpose. So – it is not only about adding tools and technology to your Intranet – we feel that the key to successful and engaging Intranet is to implement a technology that provides a solid ground for the true added-value – an embedded domain expertise that adds a business dimension to the technology.

Intranet & Portals 2010 was a great forum that brought together different industries and leading companies. We loved this year’s presentations from; BT, Mars, Allianz, Nokia and KPN among others – thank you for inspiring us! We are all sitting in the same boat – why not share ideas and help each other out over a cup of tea in Amsterdam. Let’s stay connected and see you all soon!