When faced with choosing top Ideas, leaders are sometimes interested in the opinion of a larger audience to help validate or guide their decision. If the audience could choose, which Ideas would they implement?


Bubble Up gives sponsors the ability to poll the audience and identify the most popular Ideas. Equally as useful, it helps sponsors see who supports and opposes specific Ideas – which helps them engage passionate participants in later work stages.


The audience is awarded Bubble Up credits that they can spend to promote an Idea up or demote it down a list. Ideas are ranked based on the total number of promotions and demotions received.


Bubble Up is a fun, engaging and interesting way for people to participate in an event and connect with ideas. The game-like nature of the tool helps increase traffic and repeat visits to the event.


How it Works


Award Credits 

Bubble Up credits are awarded to the challenge audience automatically every Sunday or manually on-demand. The administrator determines the number of credits allocated. Unused credits do not carry over from week-to-week.


Promote & Demote Ideas 

Audience members use their credits to help prioritize Ideas in the challenge by promoting them up or demoting them down the Bubble Up list. Each time they promote or demote an Idea, they spend one credit. You can also configure Bubble Up voting to only allow users to promote Ideas.


Bubble Up Ranking 

Ideas are ranked based on the total number of promotions and demotions received. As people spend credits, the list evolves to show you which Ideas are most popular.

Connect with People Passionate about an Idea 

The event sponsor and review team can see a breakdown of who has promoted and demoted each Idea. This helps them engage people who support or oppose an Idea in stages of the Idea’s development.


Weekly Reminders 

Bubble Up participants can receive email alerts when new credits are awarded and can opt-in to weekly updates on the ranking list.



When to use Bubble Up

Bubble Up is especially useful when the popularity of Ideas aligns with their business value. When the popularity – which often reflects the self-serving opinions of participants – of Ideas is important, then Bubble Up gives sponsors the ranking they need. This is often the case when the challenge audience is being used as a sample of a company’s general consumer base.


It is also important to note that Bubble Up participants use their own personal opinions when deciding which Ideas to promote or demote; they are not using criteria laid out by the challenge sponsor. They are essentially answering the questions, “Which Ideas do you want or not want to see implemented?” This means the Bubble Up ranking is subjective and reflects the general popularity of Ideas.


When deciding whether or not to use Bubble Up in an innovation challenge, consider:

  • Who will be impacted by the results of the challenge
  • Who is responsible for implementing the top Ideas
  • The relationship between who’s impacted by and who’s implementing the results Bubble Up will be especially useful when it is used to:
  • Identify the most popular solutions to a general problem with a large, diverse audience. A brand manager runs an event to identify new flavors for an existing cereal. She invites the entire company to suggest flavors and uses Bubble Up to find out which flavors are most popular with their employees, which she’s tapping into as a reflection of their consumer base.
  • Identify the most popular solutions to a functional problem with a large, cohesive audience. The CTO invites all IT employees to an event about how to improve their process for acquiring new hardware. The CTO is interested in which Ideas her employees think are most important, so she lets them prioritize Ideas via Bubble Up.
  • Allow a service function to mange and prioritize its work with internal clients. The CMOinvites all sales and marketing employees to suggest what marketing collateral needs are going unmet. Bubble Up allows the groups to collectively prioritize the needs together.
  • Allow a small team to prioritize their work. A leader runs an event within his team to brainstorm all the projects the team could do next. The team then uses Bubble Up to prioritize which projects to do first.


Emerging Best Practices

  • Set the audience’s expectations regarding how the Bubble Up ranking will be used. It’s OK to generally say that the ranking will inform the review team’s evaluations. Be careful about making explicit guarantees like “the top 5 ideas will be implemented.” Quite often the sponsor will not agree with the Bubble Up ranking and the audience won’t appreciate having false expectations set.
  • The largest population in the audience may control the ranking because they have the most credits.
  • Over time Bubble Up can be gamed by a group of power users. If participation in Bubble Up wanes over time, then power users can dominate the ranking. It’s better to use Bubble Up for short durations.
  • Bubble Up is not yet integrated with our Review Tools, like Mass Reviews or Mass Conclusions.
  • When there are hundreds of Ideas in a challenge, it is hard to find Ideas of interest in the Bubble Up list. Many Ideas sit in the middle of the ranking with 0 points.