The State of California is getting a lot of attention this week for its challenge to constituents to help the state increase IT efficiency by 10x while spending 1/10 the budget.  They've set up a website to collect and filter ideas from regular people, and it’s powered by a startup called IdeaScale that bills itself as an “Idea Management” company. 

There are a couple of high-profile startups in this "Idea" space (see Spigit) that are showing great traction with the Fortune 500 and government clients.  The general idea behind these apps is that any large organization’s employees and customers represent an untapped gold mine of ideas.  Until now, extracting and filtering those ideas has been a mess.  The old “suggestion box” just doesn’t cut it, so technology companies are rushing in to help - providing a simple way for people to submit ideas, vote on ideas, and bubble the best to the top.

At its core, AdHatchery is also an Idea Management company.  We’re helping media agencies to extract and manage valuable ideas from a largely untapped gold mine of ideas – sellers.  It turns out there are thousands of sellers just chomping at the bit to give advertisers their best ideas. As an industry though, we're still caught in a "suggestion box" paradigm.  Information moves between buyers and sellers at a snails pace.  Information sharing between accounts at agencies is almost non-existent.  Buyers routinely move in and out of accounts, and their information resources move with them.  The people at agencies on the front lines of ideas simply don’t have tools to help them gather / filter information efficiently, while the amount of information available to them is growing exponentially. In the end, clients suffer.

AdHatchery is here to help.  Let me highlight a couple of features built for media buyers to manage ideas.  First, the “Star.”  When ideas are submitted through AdHatchery, buyers can choose to give it a Star and this becomes a primary sorting mechanism. 

Below, you see the basic header of a buyer’s Idea Dashboard on AdHatchery. All ideas that are ever submitted to an account through AdHatchery live in perpetuity on the dashboard.  Buyers can filter the dashboard by 1) ideas they’ve starred or 2) ideas their colleagues have starred.  They can also sort by account, seller company, seller rep or the date it was submitted. In the near future, we’ll allow them to sort / filter by publisher type, content type, ROI metric, etc.  If you’ve ever used Kayak’s search function, then you can imagine what we have in mind.