In today’s competitive world, it’s no secret that organizations struggle to come up with competent and innovative solutions to facilitate growth and stay ahead in the game. One of the best ways of improving service, product or efficiency parameters is to tap into the effective intelligence of your employees.
Employees are the front runners in driving any specific initiatives of the organization. As employees experience the daily rush of churning the relative business outcome, there is a high likelihood of them coming up with an innovative solution in order to maximize their efficiency and add their bit to the organization overall growth.
Innovative Ideas are universal. They can arise from employees across different departments, groups and experience levels. Too often, great ideas are left unsaid or not recognized. So, there arises a question – how to manage the influx of best innovative ideas that are unfolding inside your organization.
Tapping into the purposive inflow and outflow of employees knowledge to accelerate business outcomes requires a tool which can furthermore streamline operations and maintain a sustainable innovation initiative.
Using an idea management software to capture the idea pool emerging out of your organization is a key solution to ensure all your ideas are captured, identified, collaborated and evaluated. It can become the catalyst for new insights and solutions the organization needs. Further, it empowers you to digitally manage your organization’s innovation strategy and processes.
According to the recent study by Accenture, over 90% of executives think innovation is key to their business success.
Out of all the potential idea management software available in the market, how can you identify the best one with the best features that fit your organization’s needs? As you know, hastened investments in technologies without proper research will lead to low ROI or worse, complete scrapping of the product.
If you’re thinking to invest in an idea management software, there are several key functionalities and features you need to look out for. Below are the 10 essential features for any idea management platform that can be leveraged to transform great ideas into tangible results.
Learn More: A Buyer’s Guide to Choosing The Best Idea Management Software
Crowdsourcing is a collaborative feature which helps you to easily tap into the intelligence coupled with the expertise of your employees. It encourages active participation of employees in finding innovative, high-quality ideas and solutions for any business challenge.
It can improve business growth by speeding up workflow processes, getting employees involved and transforming the way your business works.
Commenting, liking, upvoting ideas are some popular crowdsourcing features that an organization has to look for.
Idea management without a proper mechanism and arm to use has never contributed its share in the overall success. Idea management to target pooling of ideas from a vast set of departments and employees requires to have a user-friendly, intuitive, and adaptive interface. It helps employees to navigate easily through workflow processes, idea submission forms, idea archives etc. which then induces openness and interaction.
Displaying ideas in several ways such as list, tile, tree views can help you to drive actions based on requirements and identify the best ideas.
Holding an interactive design can maximize the number of promising ideas being added, as well as encourages the organisation from moulding their culture towards a more engaged one.
Learn More: Creating and driving a culture of innovation in the workplace
An effective idea management framework with a systematic workflow process can engage your employees in the process of truly evaluating and developing ideas.
Representing how the idea flow will work in capturing, identifying, building, redefining and selecting ideas can beget mutual trust in employees, which then induces openness and interaction boosting employee engagement.
Check out the workflow of our own idea management workflow system.
Gamified collaboration involves engaged and cheering participants who are excited to innovate and contribute to business success. It improves user-adoption rates by providing ideation points, badges for contribution, achievement levels, dashboards with progress bars and other visual metrics which can measure, recognize and reward their contributions.
Learn More: 6 easy ways to capture ideas from employees
If you want to invest in idea management software, ensure that it offers an inbuilt analytics tool that helps in gaining insights and making smart decisions. Configurable dashboards and flexible role-based ad-hoc reporting technology can empower you to recognise the best ideas and work upon them. You can also have a quick track and report on all the metrics and trends.
A campaign or challenge is a specific proposal for crowdsourcing ideas against a particular focus area or business challenge. Idea management solution needs to support unlimited, targeted idea campaigns in the organization.
It helps in setting up specific campaigns within the software – each one of them tailored to address a specific business objective such as reducing costs in a division or innovating ideas for new product launches, etc.
Focused innovation around particular business challenges has proven effective resulting in a higher number of quality ideas.
Idea management software needs to have a customizable idea input forms related to a specific campaign or project needs. This is because of a broad range of aspects involved in a campaign related to strategic support, revenue generation, cost containment, new product development, etc.
Having a customizable submission form for different business challenges can facilitate campaign manager the flexibility to capture the information they need to successfully evaluate the ideas that are submitted.
Before proposing a new business challenge or campaign, you need to look through existing ideas to see if there is something that might address the needs. This means you have to search for the required solutions in the vast pool of ideas that missed the attention or went unutilized.
An idea management solution having the ability to archive ideas and search through ideas is paramount. Using the strong search functionality you can easily find the solutions from the pool of available ideas. You might easily find a great solution to your business challenges.
Recognizing and rewarding can make employees feel valued for their contributions and encourage them to collaborate and submit more ideas boosting employee engagement and adoption of the initiatives.
Idea management system with incentive-based rewards and recognition system encourages employees to voice their suggestions and continue contributing their ideas towards a common business goal influencing organizational growth.
Read More: Engage people through innovation management
User feedback, both positive and negative, is very helpful in shaping up the future of the initiatives. It provides insights into what is working well and what needs to be changed to make the experience better. It brings valuable information that will be used to make well informed and calculative decisions.
The gathered insights can help you to make useful changes to the idea management software to meet the employee’s expectations at scale and fulfil their needs to ideate effectively.
Top organizations are performing extraordinarily because they consistently search for ways to make their best even better.
Novel ideas are the key ingredients of the innovation process. Great ideas contribute to the organization growth and success at scale and quality. Idea management software enables organizations to gather, share and evaluate ideas with speed and flexibility like never before. It helps businesses to stay ahead of the competitive world with productive ideas that impact the foundation of the organization.
They provide a strategic procedure and powerful workflow to assure the best ideas are captured and implemented quickly. It also allows you to measure the impact of ideas collected and implemented, making it easier to determine the “return on ideas” that these idea management systems provide.
As most of the organizations have begun to introduce idea management software, there is a constant pace of new vendors into the market. MarketsandMarkets Research forecasts that the innovation management market is projected to grow from an estimated $421.6M in 2017 to $1,519.2M by 2022, at a CAGR of 29.2% during 2017–2022.
Forrester also claims that 53% of global services decision-makers are investing in emerging innovation and idea management technologies to drive innovation.
If you’re looking for the right software that helps you implement innovation within your organization and yield an impressive return on innovation investments?
Check out Acuvate’s idea management software – Wave, one of the top idea management solutions that incorporate innovative culture in the organization with modern features to boost employee engagement. Schedule a free demo now.
Read More: An Introduction to the Ultimate Idea Management Solution – Wave
Sareen Madupu is a Product Manager for Mesh at Acuvate. He has around 9 years of experience in Usability and User Experience of Digital Interfaces. He has been with Acuvate for 7 years and worked on concepting UX of 30+ intranets.
Sareen Babu