Planbox Review

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Planbox

Planbox is an innovation management platform that enables organizations to manage ideas, projects, and tasks that bring new products and services to the marketplace. The collaborative platform is built from modules that allow teams to collect ideas from employees, customers, and other partners, and convert them to projects using agile best practices.

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Planbox Features and Strengths

Insight and Opportunity Development

Planbox includes an innovation module that helps streamline the front-end process of innovating and uncovering high-impact opportunities. Planbox Discovery Central provides users with an intuitive interface to promote and accommodate some of the best practices for innovation. It integrates creative problem-solving, design thinking, insight discovery, and lean startup functions.

Users can browse using search and AI from several digital inspiration sources such as blog feeds, social medial posts, and Wikipedia articles. They can build a database of insight archives through interviews, team collaboration, and other learning activities that they can revisit and review. Other features include the ability to combine different clues and create mashups to yield insights, apply pattern-detection analysis to detect emerging trends, and transform promising opportunities into active projects.

Scaled Innovation Management

Another Planbox module is Innovation Central which enables organizations to apply a systematic approach at scale. Its ideation engine is specifically designed to help companies in their growth and transformation phases. It has features for idea submission, commenting, browsing, idea building, social reviewing, and recognition.

The innovation management software provides idea clustering tools so users can quickly sort ideas into topic-based clusters. It also has interactive browsing tools and visual displays to explore databases of content and collaborators. Planbox also has crowd voting, virtual currency, reviewer scorecards, and executive charts to help decision makers understand which efforts to prioritize and fund. Other tools are for measuring collaboration activity and uncovering communities of interest that include expert creators and connectors within the organization.

Agile Work Management

Once ideas have become actual innovation projects, Planbox provides an agile work management module through Agile Central. It is a complete tool for project managers and project teams. Project managers can plan and prioritize backlogs, customize up to four levels of project structure, assign deadlines, and set reminders. PMs can also monitor progress with burndown charts and keep track of everything with reports.

Project teams, on the other hand, can easily see their to-dos with filters, create items and tasks with a drag-and-drop interface, create estimates, and track time spent on tasks. The work management software also supports real-time collaboration with activity feedback, comments, and centralized files management.

Innovation Portfolio Management

Organizations working on multiple projects can manage their innovation portfolio with the Planbox Portfolio Central module. It provides a complete set of tools to manage innovation projects from launch to completion. Companies can see their entire portfolio using a consolidated dashboard. It includes dynamic graphs that users can configure to show information by operating unit, initiative type, or financial impact.

It summarizes the complete portfolio for simplified measurement. Users can track projects according to deadlines, deliverables, and outcomes. They can also track status, cost, profits, and other performance metrics for benchmarking. Other features include enabling users to establish standardized process management, exposing project responsibility, automating workflow alerts, and tracing projects back to their original ideas.

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Planbox Pricing

Planbox pricing is customized for every company. Interested parties can contact the Planbox team to request for a demo of the software.

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Who Uses Planbox?

Planbox is for businesses of all sizes in need of an innovation management platform. Different executive roles can use the software and apply it across industries such as in energy & utilities, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, transportation & logistics, consumer & retail brands, media & entertainment, and the public sector. Customers include Chevron, Verizon, Boeing, Goodyear, Great-West Life, Barton Malow, NZ Hemp Industry Association, and Novartis.

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Planbox Supported Languages

Planbox supports more than 60 languages including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

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Case Studies

Richard Barge is the chairperson for New Zealand’s Hemp Industries Association, composed of stakeholders from the government, growers, processors, suppliers, and retailers. By partnering with a software and technology solutions provider, the association wanted to identify opportunities for what they feel is “the crop of the future.”

The association decided to use Planbox to find new uses for hemp that all industries can benefit from without having to start from scratch. Planbox Discovery Central provides a collaborative innovation discovery software that allows the two organizations to engage with a community of researchers, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and other interested parties in collaborative concept development. In less than 8 hours, the participants produced almost 400 ideas.

Aimee Reynolds is the project liaison for a pharmaceutical company’s unique startup program. The Genesis Labs program invites associates to submit scientific ideas that the firm may consider for funding. Selected ideas will allow the company to prototype new discoveries, accelerate innovation, and nurture grassroots concepts.

The company implemented Planbox to help scale and manage the program. Planbox Innovation Central empowers the company’s employees to contribute without fear transformative ideas that can revolutionize medicine. Reynolds stated that Planbox gives their colleagues psychological safety for being willing to propose what sometimes might seem like crazy transformative ideas.

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Why Choose Planbox?

Planbox is an effective solution for streamlining a company’s innovation process. Software industry analysts and consultants have consistently recognized the platform in their latest reports to be among the leaders in the innovation management platform market. It offers a comprehensive project management solution to assist users throughout the innovation life cycle, from ideation to completion. The platform also provides intuitive tools to manage ideas, projects, tasks, and portfolios in a collaborative environment that helps drive growth and create value.

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Company Info

Planbox is a private agile software company based in Laval, Québec. It was founded in 2009 by a team that includes Michael Gero and Martin Drapeau, along with Olivier Cabanes, Magali Janvier, and Martin-Luc Archambault, the founders of startup incubator firm Bolidea. In 2015, the company merged with BrainBank, a private innovation management software company based in Dorval, Québec. Since then, the company continues to offer a best-of-breed agile work innovation solution under the leadership of CEO Ludwig Melik, the founder of Tenrox, which has been acquired by Upland Software.

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