IdeaScale enables companies to build living/breathing Digg style communities. IdeaScale is based on the simple model of crowdsourcing. It begins with an idea posted to your IdeaScale community by a user. Each idea can be expanded through comments by the community. The ultimate measure of an idea is determined by a voting system. Any idea can be voted to the top or buried back down to the bottom. It combines the "wisdom of the crowds" concept with Web 2.0 models like Digg.

Too often users are dissuaded from giving feedback either because they believe that giving feedback will not affect change or feedback is solicited at an inopportune time. The IdeaScale portal allows users to provide feedback in a collaborative model where they can see the kind of feedback other users are providing. They can then improve upon the suggestion using comments and ultimately quantify the feedback by voting the ideas up or down.

By integrating points (points for posting ideas, points for voting and points for commenting on other ideas) with the transparent feedback model, a sense of ownership and kinship can be achieved with the participants that is simply not available using other feedback models like surveys.

Surveys typically are a very intrusive feedback model. Users generally get invited to take surveys via email or a website link. While the website link is not as intrusive as the email invitation, the question of timing is paramount.

One of the biggest challenges of surveys is that when soliciting unintended feedback on concepts, they are generally bucketed into open-ended comments. There is a fair amount of "data" in these open-ended comments and it is nearly impossible for researchers and administrators to gather actionable results. The IdeaScale model turns the table and uses the crowdsourcing strategy to allow other users to quantify ideas.