When working on European projects, idea flow and sometimes it is not always easy to keep up. The more EU calls you are interested in, the more likely you are to come up with innovative ideas. You need to categorize those ideas, cross-reference them with the corresponding calls, and most importantly not forget about them.
That is not easy of course. At the same time, if you want to share your ideas with your potential future partners and start working on them, you will need to send your ideas back and forth or keep calling each other to talk about them.
The EUcalls platform recognizes the need for a solution to this problem. As a result, we have launched our new and innovative feature the Idea Pad! The Idea Pad is everything you need and more. With a user-friendly interface, you can now record your ideas and store them in one place, making sure that you are not going to lose them or forget about them.
How it works
Every time you log in to your EUcalls profile, you will go through your favorite calls. While reading you will get an idea about a potential proposal. Immediately you can go to the right side of the page and click the Start Now button. In the window that will pop in front of you, you will get to give your idea a title and a brief description as well as make a side note regarding your basic need for this call. Are you looking for a partner, a co-ordinator or is this just an idea or a potential project?
At the end of the window, you will have the opportunity to either publish your idea or save it as a draft. By saving it you can come back to it later and work on it a bit more. If you click the publish button, your idea will immediately be visible right next to the call. That way anyone who might visit that call will see that you have an idea and will contact you.
Idea Pad Dashboard
All of your ideas, draft, public, or in any other form, are stored in the “My Ideas” dashboard which is accessible after you create your first idea, from the menu on the left side of the screen.
There you will notice the following buttons. The All button, where you can find every idea you have stored, the Public button where you can only see the ideas you have published, the Draft button which will include all the ideas that you want to work on, the Archived button where you can store ideas from calls that have already been closed or perhaps old inspirations that you don’t want to have in front of you all the time but you don’t want to lose either.
Lastly, you will notice the Invitations button. There you will see all the ideas that you have been invited to work on. This is a great way for you to start talking to new partners and start working on new projects.
When you declare an interest or if you have an active profile, partners can follow your account and start inviting you to work on their ideas with them. This will greatly increase your network.
Invite your own partners
Of course, you can get invited as well as invite partners to work on your idea. The innovation about the idea pad is that, apart from your EUcalls contacts, you can also invite partners that are not yet registered in the platform, to work with you on your idea via email.
The EUcalls Idea Pad is a great way for partners to communicate an idea, start commenting on it and exchanging opinions without having to worry about emails getting lost or not being able to keep track of your thoughts.
When you start working on an idea with your partners, you can start a New Topic, choose your topic’s subject matter (General Discussion, Question, Task, Budget, etc) separate topics based on their subjects. You will no longer worry about a conversation getting out of hand or lose important notifications from your partners. All you will need to do will be to look in the appropriate Topic section.
The Idea Pad is a feature still in the making that has a lot of potentials. It is already growing as a concept seeing as it can make things easier for you when it comes to working on an idea that could eventually become a concept note for your proposal.
Start working on your new ideas today. Invite your partners, get invited, and widen your network with more collaborations and more proposals than ever!
