How to choose the Best Innovation Management Software for your business in 2021?

Posted by Shekhar Tekade on March 22nd, 2021

Innovation management software, also called idea management software, is the systematic way of managing the entire idea management process. It is an easy-to-use tool that helps organizations in collating ideas on a platform for evaluation and further implementation. This software, if used properly, can be hugely transformative for any business.

Innovation management software not only helps in managing the innovation management process but also ensures that the users are always motivated to share new ideas and get recognition from time to time. The software lets users trace in what manner different ideas are advancing.

Innovation management software is one of the most trending software implemented in organizations in 2021. There are numerous providers of this software. Hence, choosing the Best innovation management software for your business can be a tedious task.

There is no software available in the market that can make innovation happen automatically, but if chosen carefully by making sure that it aligns your business goals and objective, it can bring tremendous change.

Instead of selecting the software that is found first, it is important to check if that software meets all the organizational requirements in the present as well as in the future. Without any more delay, here is the quick process of finding the best innovation management software for your business in 2021:

Step 1: Define Goals

Even though there are quite a few great innovation management solution that you want to try, the logical way of going ahead with this is to chart your goals and requirements. This step will be very helpful in understanding long-term and short business requirements. For example, What is required from the software in the short term? How will it help in long-term goals? Are goals and business strategies aligned well? What KPIs are considered while evaluating innovation activities? This is a crucial step as it will help in defining the requirement of software as per the business needs.

Step 2: Shortlist Required Features

In the first step, goals are set. This step will help in shortlisting the required features and will also eliminate the software that are not providing the required features. Here are a couple of key features provided by innovation management software to look for: workflow process management, crowdsourcing features, idea collaboration, gamification features, and real-time ROI tracking.

Step 3: Shortlist Vendors

Once all features are shortlisted, you can go ahead with shortlisting the vendors. This step is time-consuming as you need to consider a couple of things before shortlisting the vendor. You need to watch out for software reviews, features, use cases, upgrades provided by the vendor, software ease, and, importantly,a free trial of the software.

Step 4: Enterprise-Ready Platform

This step is very important. As there is a huge demand for innovation management software, there are many providers coming up in the market. Hence, it is very important to check if the selected vendor offers enterprise-level safety and scalability as per your requirements. It should also support the mobility requirements of the business and should be flexible enough to get integrated with the current organization’s processes.

Step 5: Pilot Shortlisted Software

This is the most interesting step as here you can go ahead and try that shortlisted software at your end. Software with a free trial is always beneficial as you can check if it goes with all the business demands. With a pilot project, you can also check if the software is very well accepted by employees as they will be the ones making the most out of it. If this pilot project goes well, you can go ahead with the final implementation and transform your business with the best innovation management software.

Step 6: Keep Going On

This step seems to be a little out of track. But this one is very important just in casethe pilot project goes wrong; then it can be strenuous for the team to find the right software. Hence, it is important to keep going on with the process again until you find the best version of the software. These initial steps, if done well again, will give you the best business outcome with the use of the right innovation management software.