HunchBuzz: Enterprise innovation management

Have you ever worked in a large organisation? Then you know how stifling institutional inertia can be to the very creative ideas that will push the organisation forward.  HunchBuzz is like an Internet-enabled suggestion box on steroids that enables organisations to use the wisdom of the crowd to create ideas, filter them, and then execute on them to produce great results.

Founder Steve Graham started HunchBuzz in 2012 after becoming frustrated with the lack of tools to assist with his consulting work around enterprise ideas management.  He brought in cofounder Thomas Mitchell to build the product, and the two have been inseparable as a team ever since.

Improving creative collaboration within large organisations is a big issue worldwide. Mitchell says that their product enables organisations to capture a broad perspective of ideas from their employees and stakeholders, but more importantly follow them up, encourage them to be nurtured, and track their progress, to ensure that the initial spark of brilliance is not lost in the enthusiasm of the moment. Perhaps more importantly, Hunchbuzz makes room for and fosters a culture of openness and creativity in an organisation, which unleashes untold latent value.

They're starting to really gain industry recognition.  Gartner Research recently selected HunchBuzz as one of their three global "cool vendors in government 2015".

While HunchBuzz have landed several large customers in New Zealand, their sights are now set on the massive overseas opportunity.  They currently have over 14,000 users on the platform, in hundreds of communities.  They include some seriously large paying customers like EcoLab, The City of London, the NZ Ministry of Primary Industries, and Callaghan Innovation.

They seem to have struck a real chord with regional governments because of the relative ease of deploying a SaaS solution as well as the need to innovate and do more with fewer resources.

HunchBuzz are about to embark on a capital raise to fund their global expansion aspirations with a big sales push into Europe and the establishment of regional distribution in London. They're also developing some interesting IP, including advanced natural language processing technology to automatically group and rank ideas based upon interactions and individual customer metrics.