What is Idea Management Software?

Introduction

Idea management software helps enterprises to collect ideas from their staff members, assess those ideas, quickly deploy them to the market, and improve productivity. The tool encourages a decentralized innovation environment in the company. It allows you to shortlist the brightest ideas along with high level representatives, and track the progress of the implementation of the suggestions. 

According to a Forrester study, 53% of business decision makers are investing in idea and innovation management technologies. With idea management software, you can collect ideas from your employees on how to tackle business challenges. It offers an innovation platform for your staff to collaborate on business transformation and implement a robust and transparent innovation management process. To get the best deal, look for an idea management solution that offers must-have features such as customization for your organization’s needs, robust workflow process, ideation and collaboration, gamification, and seamless integration.

Features of Idea Management Software

Focused on Campaigns/Challenges

The application should allow you to run unlimited idea campaigns in different communities such as regions, teams, whole company etc. A challenge or campaign is a specific ask for ideas on a particular focus topic or area. Untargeted and unstructured ideas from the staff will not be useful as they are not aligned to the strategy or needs of the company. Therefore, it is more effective to run targeted idea campaigns.

Branded and Personalized for You

You should create a brand, or group of brands, for your innovation campaigns. It could be a fresh brand or an extension of your main corporate branding. For both purposes, find an idea software that aligns with your requirements. You can initiate different idea campaigns and brands such as continuous improvement, innovation, customer-facing suggestions etc. The idea management application should support different branding choices for these sub-brands within one platform.

Configurable and Flexible Workflows

Top idea management software solutions enable you to develop your own innovation processes for idea campaigns and challenges. Some campaigns may need just a basic process for idea collection, analysis, and selection, while others may require complex workflows and multiple development stages. The best platforms allow you to create your own process to get the desired results from the innovation campaigns without extensive technical know-how.

Integrations with Social Tools/Networks

The idea management software should integrate seamlessly with your enterprise’s existing tools such as Jive, Slack, Yammer, intranet, Sharepoint etc. that you employees use for communication and collaboration every day. In addition, the idea platform should integrate with social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to facilitate fast on-boarding and closer engagement with your stakeholders. Some vendors also offer an open API solution that you can utilize to integrate the idea management tool with your other software systems.

Data and Analytics

These tools allow you to analyze, visualize, and report on campaigns and activities for engagement, tracking, and reporting purposes, and to identify trends. You can analyze overall data to spot general trends or evaluate specific communities/campaigns/challenges to measure specific results. In addition, you can view leaderboards to monitor important contributors and innovators in your community as well as trends in ideas and challenges.

Data and analytics tools also allow you to personalize your data and place the pertinent info in the right context. They offer drag-n-drop dashboard widgets to provide easy access to the most relevant info. You can define permission levels for different types of data to promote transparency, while ensuring only authorized users are able to access sensitive information.

Benefits of Idea Management Software

Capture Ideas

Idea management software enables you to collect ideas and suggestions from staff members in all business units. Encourage all employees to share their thoughts to get a higher number of imaginative ideas for organizational development.

Quickly Deploy the Best Ideas

With idea management software, you can quickly collect the brightest ideas and use them effectively to improve your organization’s productivity. Thus, you can get more ideas and the capacity to capitalize on them quickly.

Promote Transparency

The software allows your employees to access all the collected ideas and provide their comments and feedback on them to improve their efficacy. This helps to improve staff engagement and enables them to proactively collaborate to enhance ideas using the open system.

Boost Collaboration

As mentioned earlier, idea management software is an open platform where staff members can cooperate with each other to share and improve their collective ideas. This effective collaboration helps to shape the suggestions into more compelling and complete solutions.

Gain a Competitive Edge

Idea management software empowers organizations to accumulate, evaluate, and implement ideas productively to gain an edge over their competitors. By tapping into their employees’ collective knowledge and knowhow, companies can get a trove of bright ideas with profit potential and capitalize on them swiftly to boost business productivity and revenue.