Spigit Taps into the Customer and Employee Innovation Market

Spigit, founded in 2007 and new to our watch list, showed solid results for the first half of 2009. The company reports strong customer acquisition, 100 percent to 150 percent revenue growth quarter-over-quarter, and being cash-flow positive.

Spigit is all about idea generation and management, whether those ideas come from internal or external sources. As such, it competes most directly with service providers such as Communispace (not a company we follow), and platform/service providers such as HiveLive, Lithium, and Passenger, which all have offerings specifically designed around ideas and insights.

Spigit comes in three flavors—IdeaSpigit, InnovationSpigit (see below), and PredictionSpigit—which are all built on the same Java code base. An extensive API set allows technically proficient clients to customize, extend, and integrate their Spigit system.

While we haven’t yet done a deep dive into the Spigit platform, we’ve seen enough to know that its feature set isn’t lacking for features. Key functionality includes discussion forums, blogs, surveys and polls, contests, reputation management (via its RepURank^TM system), ratings and reviews, role and permission management, administration tools, analytics, and more. During the first half of the year, along with various enhancements over several Spigit 2.x releases, the company now offers authentication integration for Single Sign-On (SSO) and LDAP. We’re glad to see this, as these integrations have become all-but-required components of today’s community platforms.

While we particularly like the nomenclature of the recently released WidgetSpigit (say that three times fast!), the platform’s most compelling component is the Idea Market and Trading system. This is essentially a marketplace for ideas, in which community members can buy into other peoples’ ideas and even sell their “shares” in ideas as if they were company stock. This system is likely not for the faint of heart, but for the right client that has passionate, expressive customers (and/or employees), we expect it can deliver dramatic results. It demonstrates as well Spigit’s impressive creative thinking and development chops.

For the second half of the year, we're looking for Spigit to continue its customer acquisition success, to develop new business partnerships (particularly to extend its market reach), and to better leverage its service offerings.

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This post a modified excerpt from our PSGroup report Online Community Platform Company and Product Update 1H-2009. Spigit has made its part of this report (8 pages) available for free at the Spigit Web site.