Ray Rigamonti

Today, the Groupidea application will be withdrawn from the web. It had been there on the web for years even though the work to further iterate it, attract users and make it a viable business or organization had been halted since early 2017.

Groupidea's scope (as a platform for organizations to collectively break down goals into ways to achieve them) did not receive sufficient interest. The vision of having a place/website to gather possible ways to achieve a goal, and structure them in tree diagrams/a directed graph, perhaps required too much effort from organizations with an unknown or undemonstrated return. Some of the feedback we received is that organizations use problem tree diagrams. However, the tree diagrams they produce are usually short-lived as part of quick brainstorming sessions in small groups and only expand a few levels down. Areas of focus evolve, thus maintaining a particular tree structure over time may not be useful. That said, we could have tried other things, such as expanding the use cases for the system we had created to relate any given issue to any number of child-descendant issues through a tree diagram and any number of parent-ascendant issues through another tree diagram (noting that both tree diagrams were just views of the directed graph relationships stored in the backend). Some of those uses cases could have been:

Notes taking (enabling organizing notes in any number of sub-categories each of which could have many parent categories).

Tasks management (enabling breaking down tasks into many levels of subtasks and linking any of them with many parent tasks).

Unfortunately, as is the case for most startup, we ran out of runway to keep iterating and exploring addressing other use cases such as the above. The aim of this post and video is to share this attempt/experience so that others could perhaps develop something valuable using it.

In our first blog post, we want to tell you in a few words what we have been working on. Groupidea is a web app introducing a new way to collectively innovate through the use of “interconnected” tree diagrams. It allows users to:

1) Explore creative initiatives, products and services (existing solutions), and find out: what problems they tackle, and how?

2) Brainstorm and break down problems using tree diagrams that interconnect to form a vast network of global quests and solutions!

3) Help organizations discover new problems to tackle, and new solutions!

Users can start an innovation cycle from a quest or from an existing solution!

At Groupidea, we like to think of problems as quests. Through tree diagrams you can explore quests from the macro to the micro level, and vice versa. Quests can range from “Ways to Ensure Environmental Sustainability” to “Ways to Increase Adoption of Carpooling Apps,” to everything in between and beyond.

We take the notion that “answers lead to more questions” a step further. To keep on brainstorming (and progressively break down quests), we express each answer or idea in the form of a quest. For example, to add new entries to the tree diagram of Fig. 2 (left), we ask: Ways to “Enable Adoption of Airbag for Cyclists"? A way to solve one quest can itself be another quest.

You can open any given quest in a web page, and explore: in one section, the ways to achieve the quest; and, in another section, its effects (as seen in Fig. 2). Multiple users can collaborate to add new “ways” and effects, as well as solutions already implemented, images and relevant organizations. The contributions of each user are shown in the Posts (and edits) sections, as well as in the user’s profile.

You can link multiple organizations to any given quest or solution. Organizations can then see it in their profiles. Your lead could help organizations spark insight, find new partners, and adopt better solutions (rather than spending time reinventing the wheel).

As information builds up, Groupidea aims at becoming a collaboratively created encyclopedia of global quests and notable solutions, as well as a tool for innovators to communicate the problems they are tackling, the solutions they come up with, and their impact, while discovering new approaches from others.

Groupidea combines the benefits of tree diagrams with those of “directed graphs”. While tree diagrams are great for analyzing problems (breaking down larger problems into smaller solvable ones), directed graphs enable you unlimited flexibility on the interconnections you can make (a node cannot only have any number of children, but also have any number of parents). For that reason we store quests in a graph, but display them through multiple trees. Each tree diagram you see in Groupidea is actually a tiny section of a vast graph of global quests. Each quest can be directly connected to multiple “ways to achieve it” and multiple “effects”. You can easily read Groupidea trees from top to bottom, and expand and collapse any branch in the same page or in a new one.

To learn more read Groupidea’s About page. The website is currently in beta. We would love to hear what you think.

You too can be part of the solution through Groupidea!