IdeaScale

IdeaScale is workforce innovation software for capturing, evaluating and implementing ideas, positioned as employee engagement software that prioritises insights and drives follow-through rather than as an innovation tool alone. It publishes innovation courses, quizzes, whitepapers and a resource library alongside the platform, and supports public campaigns as well as internal ones.

Positioning against static surveys is the sharpest thing about it, and the criticism lands. An annual engagement survey asks employees what they think, produces a report, and changes nothing they can observe, which is why response rates decline every year. A platform where a submission can be voted on, funded and implemented gives employees evidence that participating produced an outcome, which is the only durable driver of participation.

Supporting public campaigns is a genuine differentiator with a distinct use case. A city consulting residents or an agency gathering public input runs the same mechanism as an employee programme, with entirely different requirements around identity, moderation and transparency.

The volume of published educational material reflects a real problem in this market: most buyers have never run an innovation programme and the software is not the hard part.