Every organization’s foundation is its ideas. However, in today’s highly competitive business environment, it’s difficult to keep track of the best ideas and prospects if you don’t have access to powerful idea management tools.
Businesses can use idea management software to gather all of their employees’ ideas and keep them in a single database. As they generate numerous concepts, these ideas must be properly kept, managed, evaluated, sorted, processed, and executed.
In addition, with idea management software in place, innovation managers can collect, discuss, assess, and prioritize which ideas are most beneficial to the organization and its customers.
As such, you will have the capacity to determine the impact of your ideas and develop them to their full potential. But of all the idea management tools available in the market today, which of them are suitable for your needs? How can these tools help you out?
In this article, you will learn of some of the finest idea management tools (and their features) that can help you unleash creativity in your company.
Let’s start.
What are the best tools to use for ideation?
Here are five of the most dynamic and feature-packed ideation tools today:
1. Accept Mission
Accept Mission is a powerful innovation platform for businesses that want to take their innovation to the next level. The platform has a group of unique and beautifully-designed solutions that are intuitive and easy to use even for beginners.
Built to boost your innovation success, Accept Mission can help you maximize your creative potential while driving innovation across your entire organization. This incredible feature is made possible by the platform’s unparalleled adaptability, versatility, and customization capacities.
With Accept Mission, you can keep your entire innovation engine going by making the smartest decisions in picking and launching the best innovation projects.
Aside from providing a streamlined location for all your initiatives and ideas, our innovation software enables you to carry out brainstorming sessions that are tailored according to your wants and needs.
You can also co-create live with the rest of your team and work on as many concepts as you like via Boards — a digital live collaboration tool that allows both traditional and virtual brainstorming when doing video conferencing sessions, linking users together on implementing great ideas.
Accept Mission’s key features include:
- Idea management across several platforms. Users can participate in missions using their desktop computers or any mobile device. For both gadgets, an application is provided.
- Smart idea management. Generate and gather ideas with various tasks and make them simple to maintain, then select the finest ideas to begin innovation initiatives.
- Live collaboration. Collaboration in real-time is required to exchange information and enhance ideas. You may upvote, follow, rate, discuss ideas, and receive updates.
- Customizability. Configure the platform to meet your company’s demands with stage gates, processes, custom fields, and branding, among many others.
- Advanced gamification features. Users can contribute anonymously (via undercover mode) and work on tasks with fun through the use of timers, goals, experience points, leaderboards, and teams for increased engagement.
- Interactive missions. Ideation campaigns may be easily built up from modest to huge groups. Powerful features like idea generation, leaderboards, scoring mechanisms, likes, and comments are available.
- Overview of the innovation portfolio. Monitor and improve progress. Execute projects more quickly and efficiently.
- The Kanban board. A function that allows you to drag and drop projects with ease.
- Summary with detailed reports. To gain a clear picture, manage, and review project progress, users can utilize charts like Gantt and others to illustrate business Impact.
- Innovation dashboard. Excellent overview of KPIs, graphs, and statistics for enhancing innovation and optimizing progress. Reports may also be utilized to demonstrate the organization’s success.
- Integration with your preferred business intelligence platform. Combine all company information into your preferred BI platform, like Power BI, Tableau, and many more.
2. Miro
Miro is a digital whiteboard platform that allows its users to create and discuss ideas, organize processes, utilize digital sticky notes, and comment on others’ suggestions. People can also upload other content to the board like spreadsheets and prototypes.
The platform also comes with pre-designed templates for collaboration and development of ideas, along with an extensive library of icons, and other items for establishing various business frameworks such as customer journeys and product roadmaps.
What’s more is, teams may save their current sessions in the whiteboards as PDF and convert them into a presentation to keep track of agendas during meetings. They may also opt to use Miro for working with documents, images, and videos for business purposes.
Miro’s key features include:
- Live visual collaboration. Working with others in real-time for a continuous flow of discussions and ideas.
- Text, voice, and video chat capabilities. Maintaining communication with team members is a must for constant updates and reports.
- Freehand drawing. Emphasize the quality of your concepts or show how they initially look with Miro’s freehand drawing feature.
- Administrative controls. Manage what your team can add, do, or see in your brainstorming sessions.
- Cloud-based working. With Miro, there’s no need to download anything. Feel free to work at your own pace as updates are saved via cloud storage.
3. Idea Box
Idea Box is a great way to simplify your company’s innovation management process. It increases engagement and motivates everyone in the team to fully interact in ideation sessions with its user-friendly interface and its intuitive functionalities.
The software also has a drag-and-drop feature to seamlessly categorize ideas and evaluate them effectively. Plus, you can rank these concepts accordingly or even map them out. You can also gather feedback via polls, crowdsourcing, and status tracking among many others.
In addition, Idea Box allows collaboration between teams so different issues, topics, ideas, and bottlenecks can be discussed thoroughly. More importantly, this platform supports the creation of microsites to establish a laser focus on certain concerns for quicker problem-solving.
Idea Box’s key features include:
- Tracking of return on investment. With Idea Box, teams can monitor their projects’ progress via tracking its ROI, which can help executives create data-driven decisions regarding the project’s future.
- Feedback management. Users can comment on proposed concepts for the improvement and enrichment of ideas.
- Robust innovation pipeline. A digital suggestion box awaits the submission of ideas anytime, anywhere. Plus, evaluation tools can be used for an intuitive idea selection round. Hence, Idea Box can help you manage your innovation process effectively.
- Creation of discussion threads. With Idea Box, discussions don’t have to be all over the place. Everything is kept in one place and categorized for seamless usage.
- Engagement Metrics. Find out how many times your ideas have gained interaction by the platform’s engagement metrics.
4. Bubbl.us
Bubbl.us is a mind mapping tool that makes the visual organization of ideas a simple process. As this program is easy to use, Bubbl.us is used by many individuals and organizations for different activities such as note-taking, brainstorming, collaboration, and presentation of concepts.
This tool emphasizes the value of generating ideas, so buttons are kept at a minimum on your workspace. Its user interface is also coupled with functionalities that can make it easier for you to deliver your thoughts well.
Plus, this mind mapping tool allows its users to share their mind maps across different social media platforms. As a result, teams can collaborate effectively and see immediate changes that require their attention.
Bubbl.us’ key features include:
- Editing with zero to minimal distractions. The user interface is intended to decrease distractions and improve attention.
- Browser-based platform. Users do not have to download any application as the tool works the same on both mobile and desktop.
- Saving work in several formats. You may save and export your work as PNG, JPG, or text and print it on one or more pages.
- Presentation mode. With the push of a button, you may switch to full-screen presentation mode.
- Team settings. You can bring your team together in bubbl.us and manage their accounts from one place.
5. Ideanote
Ideanote is an idea management solution that helps companies generate and simplify concepts by being a focal center for teams to share, evaluate, and assess varying ideas.
You may also develop various ideation campaigns and introduce new concepts for workflows, products, and solutions. Following that, you may promote all of your missions through links and email.
Furthermore, the platform’s simple and user-friendly design is a must-have for keeping things on track. It also provides collaboration options for further review and analysis of ideas.
However, because of the number of functionalities it offers, some customers find the platform hard to learn and navigate.
Ideanote’s key features include:
- Idea ranking. Ranking ideas according to a set of criteria agreed by the organization helps in prioritizing concepts that are both feasible and beneficial for the company.
- Tasklist. Setting a task list for every member of the team keeps them focused and up-to-date with urgent matters, which guides them on items that require their immediate attention and expertise.
- Status tracking. With Ideanote, monitoring the progress and status of projects has never been easier.
- Gamification. Inserting gamification elements every now and then incorporates fun in executing tasks.
- Collaboration tools. Work closely with everyone on your team to successfully carry out projects.
Choose as many tools as you need
In today’s fast-paced world, it can be difficult to keep track of the best ideas and prospects if you don’t have access to powerful idea management tools.
Businesses that want a competitive edge should use an idea management software system to gather all their employees’ ideas and put them in one database.
As they generate numerous concepts, these ideas must be properly kept, managed, evaluated, sorted out, and processed before being executed. On the other hand, if you find it hard to stick with one, you can always choose and use as many tools as you need.
It’s also a good idea to know more about idea management before hunting for the best ideation tool to use. We actually have an ebook that serves as the ultimate guide to idea management. Feel free to grab a copy today on our website.
