Inmagic is launching an idea management system called IdeaNet this week, claiming to deliver the “right mix of culture, process, and tools to support open and fluid lines of communication across organizational communities and silos.” That’s quite a mouthful, not to mention a lot of Big Ideas right there.
IdeaNet features an intuitive and flexible user interface so product managers, engineers, and customers can contribute to and benefit from a collaborative innovation process. Unlike other Social CRM and idea management providers, IdeaNet does not consider internal collaboration with staff and external communication with customers to be mutually exclusive. Socialcast, for example, announced they were moving in a similar direction to mix and match internal and external contributors this week as well.
The service has sections for idea submission, discussion forums, integrated blogging tools, and various reporting features too (the screenshot shows one sample report).
Indeed, social networking tools such as Socialcast, Yammer and Socialtext are probably the biggest competitors to IdeaNet, and face some of the same challenges in terms of getting critical mass as well as people used to using the tool.
You can download the IdeaNet data sheet here. Annual license pricing begins at $1 per user for a 500-user community droping to less than 15 cents per user for larger communities.
