October 13, 2025

HBR Nailed the Why — Here’s the How.

This audio was recorded by AI:

In our Harvard Business Review article published last week, my coauthors and I established that most companies don’t lack ideas; they lack efficient idea marketplaces that can reliably connect people who know the problems with people who can solve them.

Here’s the hard truth: when a company spots a real market need and encourages its teams to solve that challenge, they find that 71.4% of the time the solution already exists within one of their employees. But ideas die in silence when we fail to see and connect them. Stop reinventing. Surface what you already have and put it to work.

When you treat your organization like an idea market, where needs and solutions meet, innovation throughput rises. The evidence is clear, and the managerial moves are practical. That’s why HBR kept the piece tight: verifiable research, core principles, what every leader can do next.

But here’s the layer that didn’t make the final cut: AI now supplies the wiring — the capture, connection, scoring, and routing that turns a suggestion box into a functioning market. Like any efficient exchange, the best idea markets have liquidity, transparency, price signals, and fast execution. AI gives you those characteristics at scale.

The Gap Culture Can’t Fill

When discussing idea marketplaces, I’ve described three levers — process, structure, culture — that organizations are already pulling. They matter. AI amplifies those levers so they scale.

Without AI, the market stalls where it always stalls: discovery is noisy, matching is slow, valuation is subjective, prioritization is political, and mobilization is manual.

Many of my 2025 newsletters sharpen the same point: the market isn’t about collecting more ideas; it’s about attention and allocation, about scarce time and resources funneling to the few ideas that will move the needle.

When it’s hard to match ideas with existing solutions, companies default to reinventing the wheel, ignoring what’s already there and building from scratch.

To make the leap from “a lot of ideas” to “a lot of outcomes,” you need AI embedded across five steps:

Discover ideas and existing solutions
Match needs with solvers (inside and out)
Value the options with comparable business cases
Prioritize objectively against constraints
Mobilize by routing to teams, budgets, timelines

Below is how the leading platforms already do this, and who to call if you want it running in 90 days.

The AI Engine Room

1) Discover: raise quality, reduce noise
AI writing helpers, often called large language models, now make it easier for employees to submit clear, useful ideas, and they help leaders ask sharper questions. Platforms like Brightidea build this into their forms and whiteboards: the AI can expand, tidy, and summarize what people type, and its “memo” feature can even turn a short paragraph into a simple one-pager (think a product pitch with FAQs). The payoff is better-quality submissions and far less review work for moderators.

If you want your challenges guided by what is happening outside your company, ITONICS brings in AI-curated signals and trend insights so promising clues do not get lost in email. It also follows strict, internationally recognized security practices, which keeps IT and security teams comfortable.

IdeaScale is designed for large, sensitive programs, like those in government. Its AI can run inside your own secure systems or on approved government cloud environments, so you can analyze a high volume of ideas without sending sensitive data to outside services.

2) Match: connect needs with solvers and partners
Real value appears when your marketplace uncovers what is already solved. Qmarkets couples AI-assisted discovery with startup scouting to link internal needs to external, ready-made solutions; it is designed to keep you from reinventing the wheel. HYPE Innovation, now merged with Planbox, connects trend and tech scouting with ideation so “who can solve this?” extends beyond your org chart.

When you need reach outside the building, Wazoku (which acquired InnoCentive) gives you a global solver crowd with a long trail of serious use cases, NASA among them. The InnoCentive story began at Eli Lilly and was later spun out, a credible lineage for open problem-solving.

For utilities and energy networks, InnovationForce provides a sector-specific idea and decision platform that connects teams facing similar technical challenges and accelerates shared solutions across organizations. Co-founded by Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill, InnovationForce has been recognized by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies in the workplace.

3) Value: create comparable business cases
The difference between a fun idea and a fundable idea is a business case. Planview IdeaPlace (formerly Spigit) built its reputation on crowd science and machine learning over large, messy idea sets, and, crucially, sits inside Planview’s portfolio tools. That means value estimates, dependencies, and capacity constraints flow into the same place you make investment decisions. Scale is not hand-wavy either: Spigit brought 6M+ users across 170 countries into IdeaPlace.

4) Prioritize: score with evidence
Once options are structured, AI helps you rank fairly: cluster duplicates, surface contrarian outliers, and align scores to strategy. Brightidea, Qmarkets, and HYPE all foreground AI-assisted evaluation so review meetings focus on differences that matter, not formatting.

5) Mobilize: close the last mile to execution
Great markets settle quickly and then settle up. Planview’s edge is the handoff: ideas move into funded work, with portfolio context intact.

In government, IdeaScale’s FedRAMP-authorized footprint and audit trails allow accepted ideas to flow into projects without creating a compliance problem. NASA’s internal NASA@WORK program is a visible example of IdeaScale’s model in action.

Use Now: Scale & Security Picks

Planview IdeaPlace (Spigit): best when you need evaluation rigor tied to portfolio/delivery and want proven scale.
Brightidea: strong end-to-end capture and collaboration with practical AI in submissions, memos, and whiteboards.
IdeaScale: the public-sector specialist; FedRAMP-authorized and newly explicit about keeping AI inside your boundary. NASA’s usage is well-documented.
Wazoku (InnoCentive): internal idea management plus an external solver network that agencies like NASA have tapped repeatedly.
Qmarkets: AI threaded through ideation, continuous improvement, and scouting; good when “find existing solutions first” is your mantra.
HYPE Innovation (+ Planbox): connects strategy → trends → ideas → execution; the 2024 merger created one of the category’s largest providers.
ITONICS: excellent for AI-enabled foresight and signal capture; ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified so security isn’t a concern.
InnovationForce: an AI-driven idea/decision flow platform that accelerates shared solutions across organizations.

Hidden Ideas, Bigger Impact

In our research for this HBR piece, we saw the human stakes — as well as financial ones — of uncovering existing solutions. Consider a data point from the animal-welfare world: if just 6% more families who plan to get a pet chose adoption rather than purchase, shelter killings would end. It’s a vivid example of how connecting the right need to the right existing solution can change lives. This is exactly what a functioning marketplace does.

And yes, digitization makes the loop faster. In hospitality, for example, AI-assisted thermostats can temper “set-to-max” behavior and reduce wasted energy without compromising comfort. These signals, when captured and routed, translate to measurable savings.

A 90-Day Path to AI-Led Marketplaces

Here’s a tight, plug-and-play way to stand up an idea marketplace in any organization. The aim is simple: capture better ideas, match them to what already exists, and move the best ones into delivery. Start small to prove value fast, then scale across teams.

1. Pilot on a real problem
Pick a concrete pain point, like cutting customer support wait times, and open it up to your employees to submit ideas for a solution. Use AI platforms like Brightidea, Qmarkets, HYPE, or ITONICS to clean up submissions and auto-cluster similar ideas.

2. Connect ideas to internal solutions
Build a lightweight “solution index” and expertise directory from your docs, tickets, wikis, and past projects. Link it to your idea platform so, as people submit, they see related fixes and internal owners. This prevents reinventing the wheel.

3. Reuse before you build
Look for an existing fix inside or outside the company. If the solution doesn’t exist, then use Qmarkets to scout startups and run a Wazoku/InnoCentive challenge to tap external problem-solvers. Only fund a new program if nothing already fits.

4. Score with numbers, not adjectives
In Planview, use a short, consistent rubric so “great idea” means “great for us right now.” Score every proposal on the same 3 to 4 metrics, such as impact, cost, time to value, and team capacity.

5. Keep sensitive data inside your walls
If you’re in government or a highly regulated sector, run AI within your secure environment (GovCloud or on-prem). IdeaScale supports this by default so you can analyze ideas without sending data to outside services.

6. Close the loop so people see results
Push approved ideas straight into delivery in Planview. Send a brief accept or decline note to every submitter and showcase wins. Visible outcomes keep contributors engaged and the flywheel turning.

7. Scale what works
Document the playbook from your pilot by tracking the prompts, scoring rubric, decision cadence, and comms. Repeat in a second domain, recruit a few “market champions,” and expand.

Why this works anywhere

These steps are lightweight and tool-agnostic. In a hospital, start with reducing discharge delays. In a bank, cut onboarding errors. In manufacturing, lower scrap rates. The same loop applies: capture cleaner ideas, connect them to what you already have, score with numbers, protect the boundary, and move winners into funded work. Do it once to prove value. Do it again to make it a habit.

HBR Clarified the Why — AI is the How

HBR’s strength is its center of gravity: research-grounded, generalizable, managerially useful. That’s why we kept the article focused on the organizational moves leaders can trust across contexts. But the practical reality I see is that AI has become the operating system of idea marketplaces. It compresses the cost of coordination. It makes attention programmable. It lets your company behave less like a maze and more like a market.

If you’re ready to move, the tools are here. Turn on the AI features. Start with one high-value theme. And let your marketplace reveal what your organization already knows: the solutions hiding in plain sight, the people best positioned to deliver them, and the next bets to fund now.

To learn more about idea marketplaces, AI trends and accessing innovation within your own organization, visit Outthinker.com today.

Outthinker Networks is a global peer group of heads of strategy, innovation, and transformation at $1B+ companies who are determined to move their organizations to the next level. Members engage in curated learning, practical conversations, and networking opportunities to be more successful in performing their roles, solving their top challenges, and keeping their organizations ahead of the pace of disruption.