The tools you utilize may make or break your innovation process.
To make sure that the organization’s series of innovation steps are effective, innovation managers must establish a methodical approach that fosters productivity in every ideation, collaboration, and other innovation-related process.
However, such an ideal setup would be difficult to achieve without using the appropriate mechanisms. That’s why in this article, we will discuss all the tools that you need to create a successful innovation process.
Let’s start!
Ideation Tools
Generating ideas may not be a walk in the park. But if there’s one thing that innovation managers know about, it’s how every employee can provide significant contributions to the company’s innovation process.
Employees have great and promising ideas. Providing them with the right tools, training, and techniques can help them share their thoughts, which in turn can help you study and explore new concepts that can be implemented in the business.
These tools can also help you give extensive feedback for further improvement, or allow you to perform your ideation process digitally.
Here are some of the best ideation tools in the market today:
- Accept Mission: Accept Mission’s brainstorming tool allows innovation teams to categorize ideas and maximize brainstorming outputs by classifying ideas and scoring them based on categories developed by the innovation manager.
- Infinity: Aside from its aesthetic interface, Infinity is also popular for its 50 brainstorming templates along with a file and note sharing option that supports various file formats like videos, GIFs, images, and many others.
- Miro: This one allows its users to import and export their projects via Slack, Dropbox, Jira, and even Google Drive. It also has a user-friendly interface for easy navigation. It also enables embedded chat, video, and commenting for an immense ideation process.
Idea Management Software
Ideas lead to growth and development. Without it, an organization cannot create value for both itself and its customers. That’s why it is important to manage ideas and improve them for a successful execution process.
Idea management involves the systematic collection, selection, and organization of ideas. It serves as a crucial part of innovation management that helps in bringing ideas to life. It increases innovation success by prioritizing and focusing on feasible concepts.
Using an idea management software leads to a lot of benefits other than an automated list of its related processes. It enables thorough backtracking and audit trailing of the ideation process, as well as the launching of idea campaigns and challenges.
Here are some of the best idea management software in the market today:
- Accept Mission: As a part of its mission to maximize innovation success, Accept Mission offers gamification features and an undercover mode that promotes every employee to share their ideas with anonymity.
- Confluence: This software is a powerful idea management software that allows innovation teams to edit documents and related files in real-time. Users can also tag or mention people on certain files and share PDFs, images, and other office documents.
- Idea Box: With its intuitive interface, users can make a microsite intended for particular challenges, along with a drag-and-drop feature for a robust and efficient workflow.
Collaboration and Communication Tools
In innovation, collaboration is key. Coordinating with one another produces better results. Both the implementation and adaptation of both internal and external changes become faster and easier with a diverse range of strengths and perspectives onboard.
Studies show that business collaborations increase competency, creativity, and innovation by at least 35%. It also enhances ideas, addresses problems, and polishes strategies, particularly when performed with a tool that speeds up processes and allows collaboration real-time.
Lastly, using an online collaboration tool saves more money, time, and energy than doing it traditionally. Teams can now record the entire collaboration from start to end, nor are they limited by session schedules.
Here are some of the best collaboration and communication tools in the market today:
- Accept Mission: Innovation managers can use this collaboration and communication tool in achieving a productive innovation process through live collaboration that helps in solving problems faster and in keeping everyone up-to-date with the project’s progress.
- Freshdesk: This one offers a plain and functional ticketing system for an organized method of responding to customer problems, along with automation technology for daily, repetitive tasks.
- ProofHub: With this tool, everyone in the team can review the company’s innovation projects and comment on their suggestions and feedback. It provides dedicated spaces to mention team members for quick proofing and notification of files and projects.
Knowledge Management Software
Knowledge management involves the creation, utilization, sharing, and maintenance of organizational data. It can also be considered as a strategy in using business information to attain the company’s objectives like improving competitive advantage and performance.
It is also a part of the company’s learning process, where teams can educate one another with relevant skills and experiences that can increase their overall knowledge as an organization. Knowledge management also streamlines the knowledge environment.
In essence, knowledge management software is a database that consolidates, stores, manages, and shares organizational information collected by the business for designated employees to access and transmit whenever necessary.
Here are some of the best knowledge management software in the market today:
- Tettra: This is a knowledge base with numerous templates for employee profiles and daily processes. It integrates with Slack and imports information from other platforms like Dropbox, Google Docs, and Github.
- Zendesk: Zendesk’s management system, called Zendesk Guide, auto-saves and archives everything you create with it. This tool also supports HTML, CSS, and Javascript for advanced designing tweaks.
- Zoho: Its desk platform, known as Zoho Desk, combines the functionalities of a knowledge base and a ticket management system for addressing and responding to customer concerns and inquiries.
Prototyping and Validation Tools
Product design and validating requirements are two of the most challenging parts of the innovation process. Sometimes, companies find themselves in situations where time, money, and resources are wasted over product designs that do not meet designated requirements.
As a result, innovation and product design processes are often perceived as uneconomical, inefficient, and fallible. However, prototypes can be low-cost. They are imperative to double-check the necessities of every product and service before deploying them for public use.
Hence, prototyping and validation tools are essential in creating strategic product designs, documenting necessary changes, assessing product and service requirements, and running trial tests with real users to examine usage, features, and functionality.
Here are some of the best prototyping and validation tools in the market today:
- Figma: Recognized as one of the best prototyping applications, Figma is a vector graphics editor that focuses on product creation cycles with storyboards, UI prototyping, UX wireframing, and a whole lot more. It is also ideal for sharing app and UI mockups.
- Sketch: This one is a popular graphics editor that is commonly used in creating both the UX and the UI for web and mobile applications. Its features include prototyping, UX sketching, icon designs, and others. Unfortunately, Sketch only works on macOS.
- Webflow: Known as a powerful CMS, Webflow offers intuitive processes for a seamless UX design. It also has a list of no-code resources that are useful for designers with little to no coding background.
Innovation Management Software
Innovation is defined as the process of realizing new products, processes, propositions, and business models to create added value for customers and employees. It helps companies improve and capture markets significantly.
However, these remarkable changes do not happen overnight. Innovation takes time and effort to carry out as it includes plenty of activities, so companies must create a methodical strategy in managing it.
Hence, innovation management involves planning, organizing, leading, motivating, and controlling resources to realize new products, processes, and propositions or business models to create added value for both the customers and the organization.
Here are some of the best innovation management software in the market today:
- Accept Mission: As an innovation software that offers consultancy, innovation management tools, and innovation training services among many others, Accept Mission integrates perfectly with Outlook, Power BI, and Microsoft Teams for a seamless reporting of progress.
- Idea Note: Idea Note enhances team engagement, manages idea funnels, measures innovation impact, and automates workflows from day one until the end. With Idea Note, no concept is left behind.
- Spigit: The people behind this tool believe in the power of collective intelligence. Its patented science algorithms accelerate the conception, management, and execution of viable ideas for a quick and hassle-free innovation process.
Get Started With Innovation
Innovation needs careful planning. It involves a lot of processes that require the usage of appropriate tools for better execution of ideas. Moreover, innovation must be performed and managed with a systematic approach.
An innovation toolset helps overcome organizational difficulties by transforming creative inputs into products, services, solutions, processes, and business models that give added value to both the company and its customers.
It drives competitive advantage, increased revenue gains, survival, and economic growth by assisting businesses in generating valuable ideas, managing concepts, collaborating on projects, and creating prototypes for validating requirements.
Learn more about the specific features of Accept Mission and how you can benefit from it.
