Innovation Hub for SharePoint

If you are dealing with Project Portfolio Management, you are dealing with ideas or so called initiatives. The owner of these ideas are typically a senior business stakeholder, but how about enabling innovation, and the ability to submit ideas, for the masses?

This proposition is exactly what Microsoft is offering with the Innovation Hub, or “IHUB” in short. Its a solution for SharePoint on-prem or O365, that also integrates to Project Online or Project Server 2013. Using the solution, your organization can quickly get started with a streamlined approach to submitting and rating alle new ideas. In order to not end up in complete chaos, it even has a built in feature called “challenges”, which is basically the place where you would set up your current top business challenges. From this point, you would add a description to the challenge, a deadline and then open up for ideas to be submitted. You can control which people should be allowed to rate the ideas, and the “Challenge” owner can then move the idea through a governed process.

The main page can obviously be customized in terms of layout and design to fit your corporate identity. Below is an example of how the “IHUB” looks like after you have deployed the core solution.

To get started, you need to get hold of the core SharePoint Solution packages depending on your current solution being on-premise or online (cloud). Having installed it a couple of times before, I would strongly recommend you to team up with a Microsoft Project Partner that has the experience e.g. Projectum (www.projectum.dk). Secondly, as with all IT solutions, the succes is not based on the technical implementation. Its is the actual change management that follows and and having an organization that truly embraces to learn from all employees. If this is not in place, no solution would be able to generate the business benefits.

Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns – I would be happy to share them.