How do organizations use innovation management software?
Innovation management software helps you to generate, nurture and implement innovation – at speed. It serves as an engine room for innovation, empowering employees (even those working offline) to contribute ideas and drive change, preventing ideas from being overlooked and providing a quick way to evaluate a large quantity of ideas.
Innovation management software enables you to capture ideas against your organization’s strategy, facilitates collaboration and provides a standardized and transparent approach for idea selection and evaluation.
Why should you care about innovation?
Innovation enables your organization to:
- React to rapidly changing environments
- Gain a competitive advantage
- Produce new products or services
- Spot opportunities to improve efficiency
- Become more sustainable
- Improve employee engagement and retention
Interested in learning more about innovation management and strategy?
Check out our blogs on the key to good ideation, the 8 pillars of innovation culture and building an employee-led innovation strategy.
How could you benefit from an innovation management platform?
By adopting edison365’s innovation management software, you democratize innovation within your entire organization, broadening your pool of expertise and unlocking fresh perspectives.
- Recognize everyday brilliance and harness knowledge at scale
- Align innovation to your strategic objectives
- Build a culture of innovation and learning
- Enable collaboration and engage all levels of your employee community
- Support both top-down and bottom-up innovation
- Powerful reporting of your entire portfolio
End-to-end innovation and delivery software
Use edison365ideas innovation management software to crowdsource employee ideas and suggestions. Easily collaborate within Microsoft Teams and triage ideas against your organization’s strategic priorities. Progress ideas with the most potential into edison365businesscase. Evaluate ideas and identify potential costs, risks, resource requirements, and business benefits. Then turn them into actionable projects defined by your ways of working in edison365projects.
Innovating at Kwintes
Based in the Netherlands, Kwintes is one of the country’s largest providers of mental health care, supporting clients with psychiatric or psychosocial problems. With over 1,100 client care facilities, they provide tailor-made care to those with multiple and complex problems, helping clients with their living situation, work and developing an independent life.
As Kwintes has an existing investment in Microsoft 365, edison365ideas had familiar UI, so they could quickly configure the instance to their corporate identity.
The innovation management software platform enables the entire organization to get involved, and allows them to vote on ideas, highlighting the popularity and potential impact of them.
FAQs
How can I create a culture of innovation?
Companies with a culture of innovation encourage new ways of thinking and a growth mindset as part of their way of working – this includes, of course, an acceptance of the risk of failure. Anyone within these organizations can put forward ideas and have their voice heard. Famous examples include Amazon, Google, and 3M.
There are 8 key “pillars” that support a culture of innovation:
- Empowering your people
- A clear, transparent process for innovating
- Diversity of thought and experience
- An open innovation model
- Meaningful rewards
- Buy-in from leadership
- Calculated risk
- Determination
Innovation management software can help you create a clear process for gathering and triaging ideas, as well as providing a central place for people to submit their suggestions.
What is the best process for managing an innovation pipeline?
There isn’t one process for innovation pipeline management, as this will depend on your organization’s aims and objectives for your innovation efforts.
That said, it’s a good idea to have stages that:
- Enable the wider organization to crowdsource ideas
- Enable different areas of the organization to review ideas in detail
- Allow you to request more information for any idea
- Provide clarity to idea submitters that their ideas are being listened to and are progressing through the innovation process.
Finally… keep the innovation process as simple and efficient as possible. Overcomplicating will only serve to bog you and your team down and confuse onlookers.
Is there a perfect length of time for an innovation campaign?
Innovation campaigns can be any length and we would recommend a mixture of lengths to keep ideators interested and create variety.
The main purpose of a campaign is to get a short, sharp spike in engagement around a specific problem the organization is trying to solve. Depending on the size of the problem, you should be flexible as to how long you leave the campaign open for. For more complex issues, you may need to give people more time to think about them and do research.
You should also prepare to close a campaign if it is underperforming or extend a campaign if it is overperforming. So, you can base the length of your innovation campaign on engagement.
Finally, we would also recommend having campaigns that are open indefinitely – people will always have ideas and these may not fit into a live campaign. Ensure you don’t miss these by having an ‘always on campaign’.
How transparent should I be around my innovation strategy and governance?
We would always encourage you to be as transparent as possible with your innovation strategy and governance. There will be details that shouldn’t be shared – such as topics with high IP or those that are sensitive for the organization as a whole – but everything else should be made clear and transparent.
The reason for this is that people buy into honesty and like to know where they stand. Your innovation strategy will undoubtedly be asking people to share their ideas and involve themselves in selecting the best ideas. So, it is only fair to let them know the reason why the strategy exists, what is expected of them, the rules of engagement, and what happens to an idea once it has been shared.
What if I only get a small number of ideas?
A small number of ideas should not be a cause for concern and you should treat these ideas the same way you would if you had hundreds.
Even if one idea has been shared, this is a precious thing and should be treated with respect. So, you review the ideas, you provide feedback, and you reward those that have taken the time to share their suggestions. You can then celebrate this and show the wider organization what happens to their ideas when submitted.
This approach will see more and more ideas shared as a result.
How do I prove innovation ROI?
Proving ROI can sometimes be tricky as not every idea will have a financial value associated with it, so we tend to simplify things.
We would recommend setting out those key objectives and targets that would mean an idea is deemed to be successful and then tracking progress against these benefits.
ROI is all about setting out with an intended benefit and then reflecting on this baseline as your ideas mature into projects and begin to realize their potential.
Why is innovation software important?
Enterprise-level businesses use innovation management software to capture ideas and store them in a centralized, easy-to-manage location. It prevents valuable suggestions from being lost and helps organizations turn them into reality.
Use cases include:
- Increasing competitiveness
- Improving efficiency
- Developing new products and services
- Boosting employee engagement and retention
- Becoming more environmentally friendly
Who uses innovation software?
Innovation software is used by innovation and business change teams to get ideas from people across their company – and beyond – to help solve key challenges, boost competitiveness or reduce environmental impact.
How does innovation software support innovation?
By using innovation management software, companies reduce the risk of valuable ideas being lost. Having a centralized area for gathering and triaging ideas also improves transparency and accelerates innovation and change management processes. Built-in reporting often enables teams to showcase the value of ideas and keep key stakeholders informed.
Having a dedicated innovation management platform in place also helps when trying to establish a culture of idea sharing. It shows that your business views innovation as a priority and that you are willing to listen to your people.
Related Content
What makes a good challenge?
8 Pillars of Innovation Culture
