It’s no secret that businesses must strive to maintain an innovative edge if they want to stay ahead in the game. One of the best ways of improving a service, a product or even a business’s overall efficiency is to source ideas directly from employees, vendors and clients. These groups, especially employees, experience the daily hustle and bustle and can offer innovative solutions to current problems or new ideas to propel the company forward. Too often, great ideas are left unsaid or not followed through.
Innovation management software is key if you want to ensure these ideas are registered, tracked and evaluated properly. From there, they can become the catalyst for new insights and solutions, carried through from the initial design stage through to project definition, execution and completion. By letting you collect, develop, prioritise and implement innovative ideas, idea management software enables you to digitally manage your company’s innovation strategy and processes.
If you’re considering an investment in innovation management software, there are several key functionalities you should look out for. Discover the following 6 essential features for innovation management software platform that can be leveraged to transform great ideas into tangible results.
1. Self-Driving Innovation
Idea management tools can be configured to your workflow and according to your needs. Thanks to AI technology and powerful context-based search, AI-driven idea management tools auto-discover information from all public and private data sources you have access to and easily automate routine tasks. Not only will this save you a lot of time, but will help you focus your limited tie on your innovation strategy and idea development instead of manually searching for, mining and identifying relevant or potentially actionable information.
2. Crowdsourcing
A collaborative idea management platform that supports a range of different innovation activities is another important feature of innovation management software. Crowdsourcing allows you to easily tap into the wisdom and expertise of your employees, customers, partners and your community to collect and develop creative ideas and find new solutions by planning and running various types of innovation activities.
Your software should let you plan and run any number of different innovation activities such as jam sessions, challenges, innovation days, shark tanks, and internal idea competitions. This will empower your team members and foster an innovation culture within your company, continuously driving it forward.
3. Adaptive Interface and Business Rule Engine
If you want to work efficiently, any software you consider should have a user-friendly, intuitive, and adaptive interface that lets you design idea submission and evaluation forms and work processes. You should be able to search for and look at ideas in different ways such as list, tile and tree views, and drive actions based on your requirements and business rules with zero customization.
4. Gamified Collaboration
One of the best ways to improve a service, a process or a product is to source ideas directly from your employees, customers and business partners. If you want to ensure they are committed to innovation, you must create a sense of engagement. This is why innovation management software offer a gamified collaboration as an essential feature. Gamified collaboration means engaged and happy participants who are excited to get involved in and contribute to innovation. For example, Planbox offers such a platform where participants earn points and badges for every action they take so you can measure, recognize and reward their contributions.
5. Agile Concept Development and Experiments
Agile concept development is another important feature of innovation management software. This feature will allow you to use a quick evaluation approach as a first pass filtering method where many ideas can be screened and evaluated quickly by designated reviewers and subject matter experts. In addition, Agile experimentation features will allow you to experiment on and develop the best ideas into actionable solutions.
6. Actionable Analytics
If you want to optimize your investment in ideation software, ensure you are making smart decisions with the help of actionable analytics. Choose software that offers configurable dashboards, flexible role-based ad-hoc reporting and the technology that will enable you to identify the most promising ideas and act upon them. As such, you will be able to quickly track and report on all the metrics and trends that are important to you.
In conclusion, if you’re looking for the right software to help you implement innovation within your company, there are several key factors to look for. Ensure your innovation management software has proven AI technology that will automate routine tasks and save you time. Your platform must also offer a crowdsourced innovation activity design and execution feature. It has been shown that running a range of different crowdsourced innovation activities is one of the most effective approaches, yielding impressive return on innovation investments.
An adaptive interface that allows you to easily design processes and identify the best ideas so you can pursue them is also a must have. A gamification option will also create engagement among all participants and ignite a culture of innovation within the company and its community of partners and customers. Agile concept development and experimentation features is also highly beneficial so you can quickly run agile proof of concept experiments, along with actionable analytics that will allow you to track and report on the metrics that matter most.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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