For a successful business, growth is one of the contributory factors that can be attained through innovative ideas from your employees, customers, or stakeholders. In this evolving realm, consumer expectations related to products and services, and managing challenges also increasing where it can be attained by using some exclusively powerful tool like an innovation management tool, sharing innovative valuable ideas manually doesn’t work effectively, whereas choosing the innovation management tool is a good decision to levitate your business to the next level.
This article lets us see the importance of innovation management tools and how it paves the way for a company’s growth in various aspects, including its role as an innovation management tool in levitating your business to the next level.
What Is an Innovation Management Tool?
Innovation management tools are often used for facilitating and streamlining the process of innovation management. With this software, employers, managers, and stakeholders can share their new ideas later. Those ideas undergo the process of collaboration, evaluation, and selection and thus it is implemented at the end of the process. Some of the innovation management tools are Ideawake, Brightidea, Ideascale, Planbox, etc.,
Role of Innovation Management Tools in the Business Sector
Innovation management tools play a vital role in levitating business growth. Here are the reasons,
Fostering a Culture of Innovation
Sharing their ideas in a common platform leads to transparent discussions and outcomes among all other employees which also creates a sense of privilege and increases the level of engagement in work. This makes the workspace more positive because it leads to an aspect like employee opinion matters.
Innovation management tools allow the employee to create ideas freely thus boosting creativity among employees. Thereby, this application fosters a culture in the business field which creates a growth mindset among employees.
Google uses internal innovation management tools to share and collaborate their ideas, thus resulting in famous applications like Gmail and Google Maps which have been used by many people regularly. In addition, Google’s “20% time” policy allows employees to dedicate 20% of their work hours to pursue their innovative ideas.
Whereas, 3M company has a ‘15% Rule’ that the company allocates a certain period exclusively for innovation. They used innovation management tools as a result they introduced a myriad of innovative products, including Post-it Notes and Scotchgard.
Collaboration Enhances Idea Generation
Satisfying your consumers paves the way for your business growth meanwhile addressing customer-centric solutions can be attained by innovation management tools, where it acts as a centralized forum, encouraging easy idea submission and coordinated feedback from employees across divisions and places.
Real-time communication provides instant response and feedback regarding the ideas the employees submit, it also encourages the employee to upskill and share many innovative ideas.
Evaluation and Selection of Ideas
Firstly, this innovation management tool allows the collection of data and information related to new ideas effectively. The core criteria behind this evaluation are reducing manual effort and eliminating bias.
The presence of multiple stakeholders from various sectors in a common platform like this ultimately enables coordinated decision making thus resulting in a well-rounded evaluation.
To implement a project allocating appropriate resources is the foremost step that can be attained effectively by effective evaluation with this innovation management tool.
Allocating Resources
Usually, management prioritizes ideas with financial goals. Every project has a specific return on investment(ROI), that has a cost-benefit ratio related to the project. Companies can allocate project timelines and milestones, and manpower allocation effectively with the help of innovation management tools.
For instance, a leading retail chain company implements an innovation management tool to drive its product development initiatives. By using the tool to evaluate and prioritize ideas, the company focused on products with high market potential and customer demand. As a result, they optimized their budget allocation, directing resources towards product lines that brought substantial returns. The streamlined project management features of the tool allow you to visualize your project, monitor progress, and make adjustments when needed, leading to timely project completion and significant cost savings.
Following and Estimating Innovative Ideas
This application enables the employees to track and access the innovative initiatives that they took. They can easily learn from their past mistakes because of centralized data and easily find the success or failure factors. This enables the employees to adapt and thrive with the challenges they face.
Allowing External Contributions
This innovation management tool paves an open platform for customers, stakeholders, and partners to share their innovative ideas, and collaboration with specialists also enables effective problem-solving.
NASA operates open innovation venues, such as the NASA Tournament Lab, to crowdsource answers to complicated problems in space investigation and technology growth.
LEGO is an online platform that enables its fans to share and rank successful ideas and concepts later they are produced as official LEGO sets which leverages the creativity of LEGO fans.
Implementation
Users might face challenges in adapting to innovation management tools, and due to inadequate training, they tend to face difficulties. Thus giving them comprehensive training, to make them understand those functionalities and benefits.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is an innovation management tool?
Innovation management tools are often used for facilitating and streamlining the process of innovation management. With this software, employers, managers, and stakeholders can share their new ideas later. Those ideas undergo the process of collaboration, evaluation, and selection and thus it is implemented at the end of the process.
- How is an innovation management tool helpful?
An innovation management tool is helpful where your employees can share their ideas in a common platform leading to transparent discussions and outcomes among all other employees which also creates a sense of privilege and increases the level of engagement to work. Satisfying your consumers paves the way for your business growth meanwhile addressing customer-centric solutions can be attained by innovation management tools, where it acts as a centralized forum, encouraging easy idea submission and coordinated feedback from employees across divisions and places.
- How does it improve a company’s productivity?
This innovation management tool paves an open platform for customers, partners, and stakeholders, to share their innovative ideas and collaborate with specialists, also enabling effective problem-solving.
Wrapping Up
In this competitive world, for a company to levitate its business growth to the next level, one of the ultimate choices is to use an innovation management application which will be a common platform for sharing and evaluating your employees, stakeholder, and consumers as well. Sharing ideas in a common platform leads to transparent discussions and outcomes among all other employees which also creates a sense of privilege and increases the level of engagement in work.
