Imaginatik’s software is designed to help businesses solve problems and generate ideas through wide-scale internal discussions.

The applications allow managers to present specific issues to the entire staff, or even to those outside the company. Participants can then make suggestions via any media, including text, video or audio files, or via links to relevant web sites.
Once the ideas have been collected, the software manages a structured decision-making that helps executives to organise a follow-up plan of action.

Big-name clients include Chevron, Pfizer and IBM, and Imaginatik claims customers see an average return on investment of 927 per cent.

The core of the business is to draw on intellectual capital from across the organisation, according to the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers report, published at the Davos conference last week.

“Imaginatik’s software and consulting services help firms to discover significant sources of additional revenue, while also providing tangible cost savings, process improvements and an increased product pipeline,” says the report.

But the key to successful use of such tools is not in the software itself, Imaginatik chief executive Mark Turrell told Computing.

“What I will be looking for in the next two years is evidence that firms are properly investing in the change management and the human processes required to support these enablers,” he said.

“It will also be interesting to see if these techniques spreads from the corporate enterprise, which have the most visible need for them, down to the small and medium-sized businesses.”

Imaginatik was founded in 1994 and was one of the first companies to explore the use of IT to enable collaborative working.

Garlik is the latest project from Tom Ilube, one of the creators of Egg ­ the world’s largest online bank. Like Egg, the new venture is designed to protect the assets of its customers. But this time the asset is identity.

The company collects personal data and uses it to build a profile of its subscribers. And, for a monthly fee, Garlik searches more than four billion web sites and public databases, charting how the information is portrayed and used online.

As well as safeguarding the use of a customer’s identity, the service also provides quarterly credit reports and advice on how to avoid fraud.

Internet identity services will be increasingly in demand, according to the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers report.

“In an era when people manage an increasingly large amount of personal information online, Garlik is raising information about identity protection and management,” says the report.

“It helps consumers to be seen as they want to be seen in the digital world, and to protect themselves from fraud and identity theft.”

User-centric technology will be as big a leap for business as the internet itself was five or six years ago, Ilube told Computing.

“Existing business will be forced to take on the technology, but it will be a real struggle,” he said.

“Organisations will eventually wake up to reality and embrace the trend, but it will take time.

“We need to see some thought-leader companies doing interesting things with it early on ­ that will lead others into it.”

Garlik was set up in 2005 and has more than 50,000 registered users. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, is one of the company’s advisers.