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. 

Mass publicly organized basic research has its roots in the crucible of World War II. The administration of research began with a simple premise: "There is only one proved method of assisting the advancement of pure science - that of picking men (sic) of genius, backing them heavily, and leaving them to direct themselves." James Bryan Conant, President, Harvard University, Letter to the New York Times, August 13, 1945. However, decades of regulations have fragmented research administration. Management is divided amongst a myriad of offices that have overlapping authority over research projects. While these mandated oversight offices provide specialized support, they also introduce their own forms, workflows, and systems, which unintentionally compound the administrative burden for researchers. As a result of this compliance-centric division of labor, information regarding the lifecycle of interrelated records is often trapped in disparate and disconnected systems, making it difficult to have a coherent view of a project.

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.

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.

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.