Would you like to invent something extraordinary, like the great inventors did in the past?

If you are seeing me, it is because you want or need to innovate.

My name is Giorgio Gottardelli, I’m the creator and founder of The Best Idea, the platform to involve everyone in Innovation, and I’m telling you how was born the project for the software and the platform that uses it.

It was the night between the twenty fifth and the twenty sixth of February twenty sixteen, when I awoke with a start, because during sleep I suddenly thought that I could use the gamification course, to which I had just participated, to develop one of the passions I had since child … the one for inventions.

I thought about how sad and poorly productive the Brainstorming sessions I had been involved with, were.

These Brainstorming sessions were experienced as a nuisance by the employees, diverted from the activities for which they had to bring results and convened in moments when some of them were taken by urgent work, for which they were not mentally available, despite being physically present in the meeting.

I decided that I would develop a web-based software, to overcome all the problems that made the corporate Brainstorming less productive with the traditional system, using gamification techniques, thus obtaining that:

1. each participant can choose the working time according to his own availability and preference, since it is not necessary to meet with others
2. the complete anonymity of those who suggest ideas and those who vote them is guaranteed, in order to avoid that someone is blocked by shyness or psychological subjection to their superiors, present in session
3. tools to help and organize the sessions are available, in the form of already prepared templates that accompany you in the various steps, different for the various types of Brainstorming activities that you want to undertake
4. benefits proportional to the time, skills and dedicated commitment, are obtained, both of reputation and possibly linked to reward systems.

So, I set out to organize the thought and write the features and functionality that the software needed.

On the seventh of March I had a flash, thinking of my predisposition as a child to find solutions to the small or big problems that I found and the impossibility to find help in their development, not knowing people who could support me economically.

It was necessary to allow anyone in the world to find possible partners for the inventions they had conceived, and which were still in an embryonic stage.

I also needed to compile the rankings of the best innovative projects, divided by type of product or service or topic, and I thought to involve users in the choice.

It was necessary that they did it with the best possible effort and I thought to put in place a system that evaluated it by comparing the vote with that of all the others, with a greater evaluation if they prove the best in interpreting the majority opinion.

Certainly, we can’t use the criterion of closeness to the average vote, otherwise many people would tend to give the middle vote on the possible range.

The night between the twenty eighth and the twenty ninth of April, I woke up with a start because the basic table of an innovative system appeared in a dream. This system guaranteed the absence of votes in a hurry or thinking in a utilitarian way, allowing everyone to vote according to conscience, also being able to dare with the extreme votes of the range, if the innovative project to be voted is bad or excellent, still obtaining a high evaluation as a voter.

Since the system qualifies the voter, I thought to give greater weight to the votes given by users proved better in the last voting sessions for the same issue, instead giving a very low weight to votes given by users proved worse, and this through a multiplicative coefficient of the vote based to the vote taken by them as voters.

After a short period of meditation holidays, on the fifteenth of June it occurred to me that the process to invent is divided into two phases, the first of which is to realize a problem, a need, an opportunity to invent something, while the second is to find an innovative solution to the problem.

Many of us, see that there are needs, but few of us spend time and are predisposed to find solutions.

I therefore thought of including the possibility to publish the needs of some users, asking others to find solutions; in this way the chances of finding solutions or inventions are greatly multiplied, involving several brains.

While the software was being developed, on ninth July it occurred to me that it would be very useful to integrate surveys into the system, for example to guide the choices for finding solutions, finding the motivations most felt by the majority part of users.

Since the platform reaches out to both private users and companies, this could also be used to make market surveys, involving either all users, or only customers, or a small number of users who had proved to be the best in the vote, that I called super-experts, for a private market investigation.

Since the platform can be used for various subjects, there must have been the possibility of greater security in the case of topics that cover aspects of the sphere of personal inclinations, including judgments of a political nature and even the choice of a party to make an investigation preventive of orientation to vote in the event of an election.

Even if the votes of the individual user are not published, but only the percentages obtained from the possible choices, I decided that in the most delicate cases, such as those mentioned, there had to be a way to avoid the match between the voter and the vote he gave.

After spending a lot of time in the organization of the business and for the analytical development of the functions of the software, on the seventeenth of March twenty seventeen, I thought of implementing the system of traditional surveys with the conditional branching survey (what others call branch logic), which allows you to organize a complete session of questions with the possible answers to choose from and for which you can define what will be the next questions for a single user depending on the choice made in response to the previous question.

This opens the possibility of using it to evaluate the learning of a student or an employee of a company that has followed a training course, but also to do a psychological test or linked to the basic knowledge skills for a job interview.

In this case it will also be possible to provide the details of the answers of the individual examined to the examiner, upon written authorization of the person, with a database that will allow to match each answer an evaluation of the examined and then obtain an overall average grade.

Another possibility of use is to give a vote to the answers given, even those with free text, to some examiners and use the same system of evaluation of the voter, in this case the examiner, to verify the quality in the judge, obtaining rankings of merit.

On the eighteenth of December twenty seventeen, having a meeting with the General Manager of a company belonging to the main Italian banking group, I discovered that there was the possibility with small changes to the existing software to implement the use of the platform also to publish the complete Business Plan for new business initiatives, to be analysed by a group of potential investors in a confidential manner, using all the innovative platform voting mechanisms.

So I decide to study the changes that were introduced in January twenty eighteenth.

I want to finish, by encouraging you to connect with the app.the-best-idea.com platform and use it, because we know that activities that don’t make innovation are destined to succumb and you can help them to become more stronger.