Ideate

In Ideate, every page view is tailored to help busy researchers and administrators navigate the dizzying array of rules that govern their projects. By dynamically delivering the right mix of procedures at the right time the Ideate software intelligently guides end-user compliance with government regulations, sponsor terms and conditions, and institutional policies.

Ideate’s system-mediated processes not only significantly reduce the effort and guess work involved in managing project requirements; they enable a fundamental shift from reactive compliance to proactive oversight.

Ideate’s Framework includes, at no additional charge, a suite of applications for running a modern research operation. Ideate maintains and enhances the existing applications and adds new applications based on industry requests. Organization’s can selectively deploy any combination of the applications, or deploy them all to seize the opportunity to consolidate their research activity on one platform.

Current applications include:

Though Ideate applications can standalone, they are designed to work together to support tight coordination across research offices; facilitating inter-office data sharing and minimizing duplication. Ideate applications use a project folder metaphor, where the project serves as a convenient metafile for organizing all related details pertaining to a single research study.

When a researcher launches a project all related applications are joined-up in an umbrella process. The project acts as a one-stop-shop logging all changes and tracking all components on behalf of the stakeholders. As details change over the lifecycle of a research project, Ideate reacts accordingly, updating relevant administrative offices and/or notifying additional business units. Instead of separately coordinating with multiple offices and then juggling the related tasks that might follow, Ideate connects all the dots for a singular unified experience.

Researchers benefit from a single rationalized process; Administrative offices achieve active compliance and tight inter-office coordination; and the organization gains a comprehensive end-to-end view of each project.

Personalized portals summarize all tasks in one convenient location, and feature interactive dashboards with graphs and charts that provide real-time insights into research activity. Users can view statuses, trends, and projections at a glance, and flexibly filter, sort, and drill into reports.

Importantly, with change being a constant in the research arena, Ideate was built from the ground up with thoughtful consideration of the Information Architecture challenges. As a result, the Service Oriented Framework provides for unprecedented governance and change management, and includes an elegant data repository.

Ideate maintains copies of all versions of a process to ensure a complete audit history and supports process-level roll-back. Administrative modifications to a research process can be submitted through an internal review before any changes are implemented. Data captured in older versions of a process remains available for reporting and can be optionally viewed in their original page layouts.

“The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental
change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their
competitive advantage.”

—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859

Ideate makes implementation easy with helpful wizards that step central administrators through configuration options without the need for any specialized technical knowledge or extensive product training. Ideate’s Configuration Accelerator greatly reduces the time, cost and risk of a software deployment and expedites the time to productive value. An initial deployment with basic configuration can take as little as one week.

Since all Ideate applications are entirely built up from loosely-coupled services, there are no hardcoded rules, forms, or processes. This means that all of the application logic is open to customization and integration with other internal systems to ensure a best-fit solution – without losing Ideate support for the underlying Framework. With Ideate, organizations can finally say goodbye to vanilla software implementations that force conformity with a generic research model.

With Ideate, institutions can even develop their own applications, leveraging Ideate’s Framework and resource library, to automate orphaned paper processes, to migrate legacy functionality to the platform, or to address new procedural requirements. Member organizations are free to share and/or co-develop applications with other participating institutions. Ideate’s support for open exchange within the user community enables customer-driven change and ensures continuous process improvement.

Ideate is an open, extensible, platform independent, and standards based Framework. The Framework provides a controlled environment (Technology Stack, Vocabularies, and Registry) with a declarative structure for authoring, executing and maintaining interactions.

While Ideate’s patent pending framework is unique, it shares a theoretical foundation with concepts found in Service Oriented Architecture; Model Driven Architecture; Event Driven Architecture; Complex Event Processing; Context Aware Information Systems; and Process Aware Information Systems.

Ideate is a Java-based Framework that renders XForms into HTML with AJAX. Client side configuration is XML-centric consisting primarily of XML process definitions, XSLT; XForms; and JavaScript. The Framework utilizes a combination of WSDL/SOAP and REST services for system communications.

Ideate’s hosted environment runs on a modified LAMP stack (i.e. Linux, Apache, and MySQL). Importantly, Ideate is platform independent and can run on any technology stack with a web server capable of supporting Java Servlets and a relational database server that supports XML CLOBs/BLOBs.

Ideate’s commitment to loose-coupling opens the door to Tech Stack extensibility and interchange-ability. There is no dependency on any specific brand or make, just semantics for each type of utility to ensure functions are executed consistently. Ideate is developing a library of adaptors to facilitate the ’swapping’ of components with like/similar utilities to accommodate various preferences.

Ideate supports all mainstream browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

The Ideate Framework can be deployed either on-premise in your own data center, or as a hosted solution in our state-of-the-art facility for a hassle-free instant-activation. Trials are available so institutions can test the system and build buy-in with internal stakeholders before committing any precious budget monies. In addition, license/subscriptions include a 90-day money-back guarantee.

The pricing model is based on the number of logins required, so the amount an organization pays is proportional to their use. There is no upfront capital expense for a license, only an annual subscription, which can be adjusted much as cell phone minutes are managed.

With Ideate, organization’s can right-size their license subscription to suit their purpose. This eliminates the barrier to entry that all too often prevents smaller organizations from being able to access the latest technology. Conversely, even a large organization can opt to start with a small pilot program and expand their license subscription based on its success, significantly reducing project risk.

All software upgrades are included during the term of the subscription. Ask about special rates for two and three year plans.