💡 Ideas Incubator

The Ideas Incubator is where your team collects and grows ideas. Anyone can propose an idea, everyone can vote and comment, and each idea moves through clear stages as it matures. When an idea is ready, it can be turned into a real project.

You'll find it in the sidebar as Ideas Incubator; it opens at /admin/tsync_ideas.

Turning it on

The Ideas Incubator is off by default — until an administrator switches it on, the sidebar item doesn't even appear. An administrator can enable it two ways:

  • In its own Settings, using the single Enable the Ideas Incubator switch, or
  • From the Configuration Center → the Ideas Incubator card (under the Projects group).

Only administrators can enable the module. Once it's on, the Ideas Incubator appears in the sidebar for everyone who has permission to see it.

Who can do what (permissions)

Three separate rights sit on the Ideas Incubator permission row, so you can open idea submission and voting to everyone while keeping status changes and conversions with your managers:

  • View ideas — see the board, submit ideas, vote and comment.
  • Manage ideas & challenges — move ideas along the status pipeline and create challenges.
  • Convert idea to project — turn an approved idea into a real project.

Administrators have all three rights.

Submitting an idea

  1. Click New idea.
  2. Give it a Title and a Description.
  3. Optionally attach it to a Challenge (see below).
  4. Save.

Anyone with the View ideas right can submit an idea.

Voting and commenting

On any idea you can:

  • Vote — one vote per person. Click again to remove your vote. The vote count is shown so you can see how much support an idea has.
  • Comment — add your thoughts in the discussion thread under the idea.

The board lists ideas with the most-voted first, so the ideas people care about rise to the top.

The status pipeline

Every idea matures through clear stages:

Draft → In review → Approved → Incubating → Converted (or Rejected).

The main screen is a board grouped by these stages, so you can see at a glance where each idea stands. Someone with the Manage ideas & challenges right moves an idea from one stage to the next. The final Converted stage is only reached through the convert step below.

Challenges (optional)

A manager can create Challenges — themed campaigns to gather ideas around a specific topic. A challenge has a title, a description and an optional deadline. Staff then attach their ideas to a challenge when they submit them.

Challenges are created and managed on the Challenges page.

Turning an idea into a project

When an idea reaches Approved (or Incubating), someone with the Convert idea to project right can turn it into a real project:

  1. Open the idea and choose Convert to project.
  2. Pick the customer the project is for.
  3. Confirm.

TSync then creates a new project — named and described from the idea — for that customer, and links the project back to the idea so you always know where it came from. Only approved or incubating ideas can be converted, and each idea converts once.

A note on the audit log

Every action in the Ideas Incubator — submitting, voting, commenting, moving an idea along the pipeline, creating a challenge, converting to a project — is recorded in the audit log.

See also