The Idea Cultivator – Mating Ideas At Work
In the business of work there is a lack of time, ideas and thoughts are seldomly shared outside of your team or your closest co-workers. And the bigger the company gets, the less everybody knows about what’s going on, what’s been made and what people think about. This is poison for innovation. Innovation thrives on diversity and sharing. And that’s what we want to refine; how can you easily share projects, ideas and thoughts with your co-workers? How can you cultivate an idea economy within your company? Let’s cross pollinate and mate ideas at work.
There are some really good online tools for collaboration and communicating at work. Basecamp is really good for managing a project and Yammer is good for sharing your snippets of thoughts or some nice links. And there are plenty of other services, but what we want is a service that helps to cultivate ideas and brings it all together to form sparks of genius, inspiration and motivation. That’s what The Idea Cultivator should do, make ideas and the work culture better by sharing ideas for existing and old projects as well as random ideas.
By sharing the ideas in a simple environment, where everybody can watch, read and contribute we believe a more productive and open culture will be the result. It’s a good thing to know what your co-workers are working on, and it’s always nice to receive praise, constructive feedback and support.
Core features:
Sort by clients and projects.
Ideas
Continually add sketches, concept drawings etc as your idea takes form. Because of the way The Idea Cultivator is made you have to form your ideas as elevator pitches, right from the start, which is a great way clarify your thoughts. Your co-workers can add comments as you go along, giving you inspiration and feedback on the way.
Files
Instead of having to deal with endless folders on a server, you can keep all files available to the whole team here. In that way files can be marked with tickets, milestones, actions or whatever.
Resources
The project manager can add budget and time estimations, how much time is set aside for different tasks/ persons. By comparing to actual time spent, pricing can become easier and more correct.
Research
Instead of collecting links etc in different google docs, it’s great to have relevant research connected to the project.
Experience/ evaluation
This might actually be the most important part. How many times do we make the same mistakes over again? Or do the same work over again? By collecting experiences from a project we can improve the next time we work on a similar project or with a similar client.
Search & tags
It’s crucial that this service is great at search. That’s also why we’d like a sidebar that links to other projects etc that are similar in some way, that use the same words/ has the same links/ are worked on by the same people..
Restrictions
Ok, so not everything can or should be shared with everyone. So we need to be able to restrict certain information to certain people. But there’s still definitely more room for sharing inside corporations!
And lets not forget all the random ideas that pops up when you work on something or are taking a shower. These ideas should also be shared with your co-workers regardless of its relevance to any project. It may become useful in the future or form new ideas in your peers’ mind. It should be super easy to share these ideas, just pop up your smartphone and share it.
With a system like this, and employees activly using it to share their ideas and experience, we bet innovation and magic will follow. What do you think?
Lets hook up and mate some ideas at Facebook!
Have an idea you’d like to share? Submit it to our Feature Friday!
Notes