What tools innovation managers use for business growth12 min read

The tools that you have in the company are essential for your innovation success. They can help accelerate your innovation processes and carry out your objectives efficiently.

For this reason, you must develop an environment that allows your team to engage in their tasks actively and collaborate on their thoughts and expertise collectively.

Choosing the right tools can make this happen.

However, as there are plenty of tools available in the market today, it would take some time for you to find the best ones. In this article, you will encounter the best tools that innovation managers use for business growth.

Let’s start!

What is your role and responsibility as an innovation manager?

As an innovation manager, you are in charge of developing the attitudes and capabilities necessary for your company’s innovation activities to flourish. You spearhead innovation projects and organize your organization’s innovation portfolio.

You build strategic innovation plans and activities based on the goals and vision of the company while leading people, projects, and changes in that direction.

Overall, you are responsible for formulating an environment that will enable your colleagues to use and explore the company’s resources for innovation success.

You need to stimulate creativity and incorporate the necessary systems and procedures for conceptualization, experimentation, and delivery.

You also have to assess and consider every possible risk present in the outputs of your team against every advantage in relation to your organization’s risk tolerance and priorities.

To successfully execute all of these, you need to possess a significant level of strategic overview, knowledge of emerging concepts, business expertise, and leadership abilities. And not to mention, an arsenal of effective innovation tools at your disposal.

By the way, we published an innovation ebook that aims to teach innovation leaders how to develop an innovative organization. Feel free to grab a copy today with no strings attached.

What are the best tools for innovation managers in key areas?

Nowadays, there are various innovation tools that improve aspects like customer service, user experience, and product manufacturing. However, you need to choose ones that can help you carry out your innovation initiatives for business growth.

Here are the tools and platforms that offer them:

Idea Management

With a plethora of idea management tools in the market, you need to choose one that effectively speeds up and simplifies your collection, assessment, and categorization of ideas.

Accept Mission

Accept Mission is a powerful and attractive innovation platform for teams who want to take their innovation to the next level.

We have a wide range of solutions that are functionally designed for users to seamlessly execute their innovation objectives.

With Accept Mission, you can:

• Gather ideas from various sources through fun and enjoyable missions made possible by the platform’s advanced gamification features
• Categorize ideas by dragging and dropping concepts into various columns, Kanban-style
• Collaborate on ideas by upvoting, following, scoring, and commenting on any presented concepts
• Select ideas easily through the platform’s advanced selection methods like target scores, personalized criteria, undercover mode, inbox integration, and export for deeper analysis
• Customize branding, settings, and custom fields to respond to the company’s needs
• Track and boost innovation success with the platform’s innovation dashboard — a feature that enables charts and reports to obtain a clear overview of a project’s status
• Integrate company data into other favored BI platforms like Tableau and many more

Idea Box

Idea Box designs different products to centralize your innovation initiatives by enhancing transparency and collaboration within the workplace.

As software for idea management, IdeaBox can help you:

• Collect ideas through a streamlined interface and a mobile app that makes collaboration possible
• Monitor progress with a robust analytics engine
• Create a solid innovation pipeline by the platform’s digital suggestion box for a convenient submission of ideas
• Automate submissions by applying scaled innovation procedures
• Group ideas via the platform’s drag and drop feature

Project Management

Using a project management tool helps innovation managers plan out every single detail of innovation projects along with their corresponding measures for potential threats. Hence, deliverables are seamlessly achieved and innovation constraints are efficiently handled.

ClickUp

ClickUp redefines productivity by putting all of your tasks in one place. With its intuitive user interface, you can simplify your work and manage every project with ease.

ClickUp helps innovation managers by allowing them to:

• Bring their team and projects together in a digital collaborative space that integrates with other apps and platforms, like Github, Jira, Onedrive, and many others
• Visualize workflows from start to finish by automating recurring tasks via ClickUp’s project management templates
• Customize their work the way they need it to be by sorting out their tasks in line with your productivity needs
• Identify bottlenecks and track progress with ClickUp’s kanban board
• Combine resources for employee training by allowing users to embed documents, videos, and spreadsheets for minimized context switching

Asana

Asana is a project management platform that helps innovation teams stay organized and connected in bringing ideas to life with speed and style.

Its functional and collaborative space organizes work via:

• Centralized support, visibility, and control brought by powerful and cohesive functionalities
• Consolidated tools on a single space that keeps spreadsheets, email, and other work mechanisms
• Set of scheduled tasks, projects, and activities done by prioritizing and mapping innovation goals
• Group of communication features that keep everyone on the same page
• Series of constant updates and real-time progress that determine project threats and run comprehensive reports

Collaboration and Communication

It is fundamental for companies to choose a competitive communication tool that caters to the needs of the people and the business, particularly in collaboration, sharing confidential data about ongoing projects and activities, business development, and innovation growth.

Microsoft Teams

With Microsoft Teams, you can make amazing things happen. This popular communication tool helps you stay connected via messages, videos, and other shared content.

Specializing in meetings and videoconferencing, Microsoft Team can also:

• Host webinars and other virtual gatherings for up to a thousand attendees
• Create hybrid work through collaboration brought by the integration of MS Teams and Dynamics 365
• Establish a secure virtual environment through a set of controls and policies that facilitate a safe exchange of messages, pictures, documents, and other relevant, sensitive data
• Perform brainstorming sessions via Microsoft Whiteboard — a digital canvas for teams to work on from a Surface Hub 2S room or another remote location through any touchscreen gadget
• Develop a more formal, virtual environment through the app’s pre-designed background images or the creation of one’s own

Freshdesk

While Microsoft Teams is largely focused on organizational communication, Freshdesk presents itself as an omnichannel for customer support.

This way, you can create meaningful interactions with your audiences through their preferred channels. Freshdesk aids organizations through:

• A cloud-based contact center solution for organizations that aim to offer a responsive voice service to quickly respond to their customers’ needs
• Customized conversations, automated processes, ticketing, support desk, and other repeatable procedures for optimal customer support
• Low-code, AI-powered bots for modern and simplified customer connection
• The presentation of relevant data for statistically-driven decisions
• Collaborative efforts made possible via integrations with other useful sites and applications like Slack, Shopify, Mailchimp, and Squarespace, among many others

Innovation Management

Because innovation changes business models, products, processes, and team dynamics, adopting an innovation management system helps companies address innovation issues comprehensively.

Accept Mission

Accept Mission has designed beautiful and unique features that boost innovation success.

From ideation to execution, this platform can help you navigate through every innovation phase successfully by helping you:

• Establish an innovation portfolio overview to measure project progress
• Create a defined list of strategic goals, plans, and objectives to increase innovation success
• Develop comprehensive reports with relevant business charts
• Track innovation success with an extensive innovation dashboard
• Increase both team and customer engagement via interactive ideation campaigns

Spigit

Spigit is an innovation management solution that offers all the capabilities required to identify, organize, and execute groundbreaking ideas to the market.

With its list of features, Spigit allows businesses to:

• Promote engagement in both users and employees through crowdsourced decision-making and customized user experiences
• Solve innovation problems via pre-designed and custom templates
• Sorting and prioritizing the best ideas through natural language processing
• Ranking ideas through branching algorithms that analyze prior assessments for effective and unbiased results
• Examining value chains via API data extraction to common delivery methods

Validation and Prototyping

Validation and prototyping involve the creation of simplified product versions to examine the feasibility of a concept, as well as its other essential components like viability, technicalities, and design.

Figma

Figma is a design platform that focuses on innovation activities like brainstorming ideas, collaborating on innovation tasks, and building prototypes.

It keeps everyone in the design process by accelerating the production and delivery of products and services through:

• Animated prototypes that represent and validate concepts for a more defined version of ideas
• Linked UI components for tailored interactions with users
• Optimized prototype features like momentum scrolling and device frames for seamless mobile testing of products
• Detailed prototype visuals like smooth transitions, extensive overlays, and GIFs
• Shareable prototypes that clients and other employees can use to provide initial feedback

Webflow

Webflow is popular for being a no-code tool in designing websites.

This way, entrepreneurs with zero to minimal knowledge of coding can create their websites faster without being dependent on developers — making a highly personalized page with style.

Through Webflow, you can:

• Save money and time in making prototypes by not having to hire programmers and developers for the business
• Build your prototypes exactly the way you wanted them to look by dragging HTML elements and pre-designed features like background videos, tabs, and sliders
• Review site layouts on different devices for concrete adjustments
• Apply style changes throughout several components at the same time via a CSS-based class system
• Customize texts by switching fonts and modifying aspects from tracking to line-height

Make innovation management easier using tools

Most businesses have innovation goals, plans, and objectives in place. However, they fail to incorporate the necessary tools in achieving their desired innovation outputs.

Hence, innovation managers must select the finest tools to carry out their innovation efforts. This way, they will become more effective in implementing the company’s innovation initiatives, which in effect helps them generate actual benefits for both the organization and its customers.

If you want to make innovation management easier, how about you give our platform a spin? Book a demo of our idea and innovation management platform and see for yourself how much real business value you can create.