Manage your ideas well with these tips.

If a business wants to maintain an innovative edge, the people within it must work hard to stay ahead of the game. Of all of the ways a business can improve their service or product, looking within toward the employees is the best direction to pursue. It is employees who can offer the most innovative solutions to problems within the company or new ideas that will help the company to move forward. Unfortunately, many of these great ideas are either never spoken or are not followed through.

Software for innovation management may be the answer. Innovation management software is helpful in managing ideas – ensuring they are registered, tracked and properly evaluated. From that point, the ideas can bring about new insights and solutions that are carried all the way through to execution and completion. If software for innovation management is something you are contemplating for your business, there are five features you should look for that will help you bring out and execute the best of ideas.

Self-Driving

Innovation management software can help you to set up your workflow according to the needs of your business. AI technology and idea management tools make it possible to discover information from many different data sources, both public and private, so you can easily automate routine tasks. This will help you to save time while focusing the time you do have on strategy and development rather than manually looking for information.

Crowdsourcing

Good software for innovation management will feature a collaborative idea management platform, designed to support multiple innovation activities. Crowdsourcing makes it possible for you to gain insight from customers, employees, your community and partners, helping you to come up with the best possible solutions.

Foster an innovation culture within your company by planning different innovation activities like innovation challenges, shark tanks, internal idea competitions, innovation days and more.

Agile Concept Development

Agile concept development will enable you to use a rapid evaluation approach in your first phase of filtering ideas, quickly screening and evaluating ideas. Agile experiments also enable you to experiment on those ideas so you can develop the most promising ideas into actionable results.

Analytics

Actionable analytics are a must-have if you want to have the best software idea management tool. Look for software that offers flexible ad-hoc reporting as well as configurable dashboards so you can locate the most promising ideas to act upon. This will help you to keep track of and report all of the important trends and metrics in a timely manner.

Adaptive Interface

A user-friendly, adaptive and intuitive interface that lets you design your idea submission forms and work processes will help you to work most efficiently. Look for software that enables you to search for ideas and look at them in different ways so you can drive actions based on the needs of your business.