Valo Ideas
Valo Ideas delivers an experience that empowers teams across all organizations to ideate and co-innovate to build their dream workplace. It is an app based on the Microsoft Teams platform so that people can start their innovation right where they are working.
Learn moreBusiness need or problem
For an organization to successfully innovate, the ideation process needs to be democratized. Ideas need to come from every level in the organization, e.g. from Firstline Workers to the senior management. Lack of proper tools and processes for making the voice of the employees heard is always a challenge in the innovation process. Coupled with the recent pandemic and the need to work from home, employees feel a disconnect from the organization. They might feel that their ideas are not being listened to and as a result the organization might suffer.
At the same time, the suggestions made by the users need to reach the right decision makers in an organized way. If the decision makers are not able to get an overview of the ideas, process them, and green-light the successful ideas, then the innovation process could be hampered.
Finally, to empower the employees, they need to be kept in the loop about the status of their idea. Whether the idea is rejected or if it's being green-lighted, the people associated with the idea need to know the current status of the idea in its lifecycle.
Business solution
Valo Ideas app brings the innovation and ideation process right into Microsoft Teams. We believe that since users are already working day-to-day in Microsoft Teams, they should have minimum friction to suggest an idea. Due to Valo Ideas being fully available on the Microsoft Teams mobile app, users are able to submit their ideas on the go as well. This is particularly helpful to Firstline Workers who always work onsite.
Since Valo Ideas is natively built into the Microsoft Teams platform, we are seamlessly able to integrate into the Microsoft Teams user interface. Ideas are created as SharePoint Online pages in the site associated to the team. This provides security, governance, and compliance to the ideas created for that team.
The Valo Ideas Dashboard is a custom personal tab which aggregates ideas from all the users joined the team. Users are able to sort, filter, and see the analytics associated to ideas that are trending in their teams. The dashboard is also made available as a tab which allows team members focus on ideas within the team.
The Valo Ideas Bot is responsible for providing status updates of the idea lifecycle to the team members. Whenever an idea's lifecycle status is changed, the bot posts a message in the conversation associated to the idea. This notifies the interested members of the idea progress.
The "Promote a Teams message as an Idea" feature allows an existing messages posted in Microsoft Teams to be turned into ideas with metadata using messaging extensions. This is so that users don't always have to start from scratch when submitting a new idea.
Business value
Valo Ideas is already out and running in production for our customers. We are seeing active participation from customer stakeholders as well as end users. It has provided them with a single place to ideate, collaborate, and manage the innovation process right in Microsoft Teams.
Success factors
Building the solution natively into Microsoft Teams has proved a huge benefit for us. It allows the app to be consumed from different clients like the web, desktop, and mobile. This allows the innovation and ideation process to happen in real time without the users having to log in to a separate tool break their flow.
IT Administrators are also happy with Valo Ideas as the ideas are created as SharePoint pages. This ensures that all best practices related to security, compliance and governance are followed. Any concerns about data residency are removed as the data always resides in the Microsoft 365 tenant itself. Using the Microsoft Teams/SharePoint platform also makes it easy to migrate ideas from legacy innovation tools into Valo Ideas.
