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Planbox is helping customers deliver on a future-fit strategy to meet the evolving demands of the 2020s.

Wilmington, Delaware — Planbox, the world’s pioneer in agile innovation solutions, continues to lead in innovation management as the top-ranked vendor in the latest Forrester report on innovation management platforms. This year, Planbox spearheaded a global initiative that brought together thought leaders and digital transformation experts to cocreate the Future-Fit Manifesto — a human-centered and tech-driven approach that builds on the Agile Manifesto to help leaders drive strategies that are more adaptive, creative, and resilient.

“The Covid crisis shed light on the limitations of Agile against large-scale disruption, which inspired us to reimagine interactions between people and systems in this collective declaration. It’s going to take a lot more than simply responding to change in a cutthroat market. As we move forward into the 2020s, a future-fit mindset will gradually separate the laggards from the leaders — those who chase the future from those who create it.”

— Ludwig Melik, CEO of Planbox and contributing author of the Future-Fit Manifesto

Two years into the pandemic and uncertainty continues to surround the nature of work. The current decade is a resiliency test for most organizations, largely characterized by the fundamental changes to organizational behaviors, priorities, and investments brought on by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. To thrive amid these rapidly changing and highly demanding times, a future-fit strategy embedded in culture and technology is mission critical:

“By 2030, Forrester predicts that a new set of leaders will emerge who will take customer obsession into the future. These leaders will be future-fit, driving strategies that are adaptive, creative, and resilient. They will help their organizations excel in technology innovation, make big bets on new business models, new talent, and new ways of working, and be more adaptive and resilient to the disruptive forces that will characterize the 2020s.”

— Forrester blogs, Seize The Moment To Become A Future Fit Tech Leader, Phil Brunkard, February 2021

Below are some of the major highlights of the last year, as Planbox continues to work closely with its customers to embrace future-fit practices in the face of these impending challenges.

Building Strong Relationships

  • Selected by the Portuguese Navy to build a cocreation ecosystem.
  • Selected by Electrolux Professional to facilitate creative collaboration.
  • Selected by Anglo American to create a culture of innovation.
  • Selected by TietoEVRY to drive digital advantage through a culture of innovation.
  • Selected by Kearney to support employee-driven innovation.
  • Selected by South London and Maudsley NHS Trust to make innovation a core competency.
  • Selected by Southern Champion Tray to drive collaborative problem-solving.
  • Selected by Rogers-O’Brien Construction to scale enterprise-level innovation.
  • Published a research report on Developing Innovation Metrics and Reports in partnership with Innovation Leader, in which 196 innovation professionals were surveyed to shed light on how large companies are creating metrics and reporting approaches that work well. 

“Planbox is the kind of platform that we want with us on a daily basis.”

— Pedro Mendes, Head of Innovation Division, Portuguese Naval Staff

Adapting Our Platform to Your Needs

  • Keep things neat and tidy with idea merge: Find and merge similar ideas with the simple click of a button to avoid duplicate content and bring focus to collaboration. 
  • Collect feedback with surveys and polls: Use surveys to gather input from contributors, or use polls placed at carefully selected points in your innovation portal and workflow to collect immediate feedback. View a summary of the results or drill down into individual responses for deeper insights.
  • Boost confidence with challenge Q&A: Dispel any doubts and help contributors participate in your challenge with greater confidence by providing answers to frequently asked questions.
  • Enhance idea quality with challenge resources: Give contributors all the information they need upfront to submit better quality ideas by attaching presentations, recordings, documents, videos, and more to your challenge.
  • Use Kanban boards for quick idea triage: Using drag-and-drop, easily manage ideas according to their status in a visually intuitive board consisting of cards and columns. 
  • Make innovation fun with gamification: Turn innovation into a game by creating elaborate game scenarios that award challenge-specific points and badges, with full traceability provided to help contributors repeat actions that have earned them rewards. User profile, leaderboards, and other reporting features now have a more inviting look and feel.
  • Compensate those who go the extra-mile with a reward store: Incentivize contributors to go the extra-mile with the ability to redeem their points for prizes; create an engaging, user-friendly shopping experience with a catalog of custom-chosen, region-specific rewards that can be redeemed in a digital store that reflects your brand.
  • Attract more attention with the SharePoint integration: Promote innovation activities (such as new challenges, focus areas, etc.) and communicate innovation program announcements (such as trending ideas, top contributors, etc.) using eye-catchy web components and calls-to-action in your SharePoint intranet. Best of all, contributors never have to leave their SharePoint workspace; Planbox is built into your SharePoint environment, resulting in better program visibility and accessibility.
    • Unleash inspiration with the SharePoint file picker: Allow contributors to upload, search for, and select files in SharePoint, and link them to their ideas in Planbox for centralized document management and creative flexibility.
  • The mobile app has a fresh new look and feel: It’s easier than ever to drive up participation in challenges; new features like idea drafts, idea attachments, filtering and sorting, sharing feedback, and many more make innovating on the fly feel like second nature.
  • Turn ideas into projects with Portfolio Central: View, track, and measure your entire innovation portfolio in one central location using consolidated dashboards and performance diagnostics for better governance and faster reporting.
  • Manage innovation the smart way with the Center of Excellence: Completely customizable to reflect your brand and its values, build the informational hub of your innovation program with a self-service system to plan, manage, track, and report on the entire innovation process and pipeline.
  • Gather knowledge in one place with Ask the Audience: Seamlessly integrate online Q&A forums with your innovation portal and bring people together to ask questions, find answers, or turn unanswered queries into challenges or ideas. Create a forum for a focus area, department, business unit, or a general topic of your choice; customize the forum’s look and feel, assign roles to ensure proper moderation, enable gamification points to drive engagement, and start gathering knowledge in no time.

“Planbox’s deep customizability and highly configurable workflows made choosing this innovation software provider an easy decision.”

— Markus Hautala, Head of Innovation Center, TietoEVRY

Realizing Success Together

  • Novartis scales innovation by bringing together 20,000 R&D associates to share and collaborate on groundbreaking ideas.
  • Anglo American realizes game-changing innovations by enabling cocreation between various business units.
  • A multidisciplinary team of non-soil scientists from IdeaConnection’s expert solver network developed the winning solution for a confidential soil science challenge launched by a leading global provider of agricultural science and technology.
  • A leading manufacturer of farm and construction equipment received a winning solution for a confidential technical challenge within months of tapping into IdeaConnection’s expert solver network. Prior to Planbox, the manufacturer had spent more than 20 years trying to solve the challenge.

“Using Planbox, we encouraged psychological safety with our colleagues who were willing to put themselves out there and propose what sometimes might seem like crazy transformative ideas on the platform.”

— Aimee Reynolds, Genesis Labs Project Liaison, Novartis

Recognitions and Thought Leadership

  • Conducting a survey on global trends in corporate innovation to improve our understanding of what large organizations are presently doing to be more adaptive, creative, and resilient in preparation for the future.
  • Recognized as a Representative Vendor in the 2021 Gartner® Market Guide for Innovation Management Tools
  • Planbox CEO Ludwig Melik has been accepted into Forbes Technology Council, an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs, and technology executives. As a member of the Forbes Technology Council, Melik regularly shares thought leadership on innovation topics ranging from culture, to strategy, to mindset.

“Planbox has provided us with a tool to be able to engage the entire enterprise while focusing on the things that matter to each of our lines of businesses. We can spend more of our time building up our continuous improvement culture and less on the administrative tasks traditionally associated with an innovation management platform.”

— Geoff Gottlieb, Senior Consultant, Enterprise Ideation at CIBC

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About Planbox

Innovation is at the heart of becoming Future-Fit. Our end-to-end innovation management platform and services empower medium and large-sized organizations to become more adaptive, creative, and resilient. Planbox helps you turn creative ideas into winning projects and integrate everyday tools to collaborate smarter with your community of employees, customers, partners, startups, governments, academia, and expert solvers. Planbox has offices in Canada, UK, and USA, with customers around the world in over 140 countries.