Innovation has always been the key to growth, and it applies to businesses too. While competition is an essential catalyst to fuel innovation, the route to ideas cannot be limited to a certain section of individuals in an organisation. A regular practice of generating, streamlining and evaluating ideas does call for some automated support. This can be skilfully taken care of with the right ideation platform.
What to look for when buying an Idea System
Most of you may be aware of the benefits of innovation management software. But what are the important things buyers need to take care of when choosing the right idea system to manage the innovation data pool of your business? With the increasing number of businesses looking to introduce innovation management platform into their organisational process, there is a continual influx of new vendors into the market. Here are a few questions to ask, if you are considering buying crowdsource software:
- can it provide workable solutions to idea management and offer you long-term support in tune with your business expansion?
- does the idea system have a comprehensive reporting process that can be time & cost-effective?
- can the crowdsource software leverage artificial intelligence to accelerate the decision-making process?
- will the idea system integrate into your existing digital ecosystem?
1. Workable Solution
Firstly, when considering a purchase decision for any ideation platform, is to establish the sole ‘purpose’ behind it. And that’s to vouch on its idea management capabilities to capture ideas from a number of your business stakeholders, particular employees.
Many employees are on the front-line, interacting with your customers. This makes them ideally placed in your organisation to contribute to ideation and invaluable for customer insighting.
However, your search goes beyond the process of just capturing ideas. A quick survey of the ideal idea software and solutions shows that the software demands a more comprehensive suite of features that can perform more than the task of capturing ideas. It should also allow you to sort, evaluate, rank and track ideas through various stages of the innovation process.
Pro-tip:Look out for a crowdsource software that comes with intelligent search and sorting features, and above all delivers feasible solution with long-term efficiency.
2. Comprehensive Reporting Process
With digital transformation revolutionising the way businesses function, an ideation platform with data analysis capabilities has become immensely valuable for any organisation. However, if not managed properly, they can be a highly time-consuming and an expensive investment. This not only calls for effective maintenance of your idea system, but also to carefully choose a software that promises a comprehensive reporting process and data profiling system for idea management.
Pro-tip:Make sure the idea generation platform you choose goes beyond just software and helps scale across the business. This is essential to assure you of setting and hitting the KPI’s perfectly.
3. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is more than just a buzzword when it comes to idea management. AI has been looked upon with delight and fright alike due to its dominating effect to take over human skills. And there’s a strong debate in the industry as to whether AI can replace human decision-making skills at the workplace.
Business decision-making is a complex process requiring a lot of evaluation, and collective analysis to arrive at a logical decision.
Although artificial intelligence can empower the decision-making process, it may only deliver 80-90 percent accuracy. Considering AI’s powered by deep-learning algorithms and historical data, it surely helps enhance the capacity and drives the innovation process. Thus helping humans to take the right business decision.
Pro-tip: If your organisation needs large scale data analysis of ideas put together by its employees, buy an idea system that is powered by AI. Artificial intelligence may not be relied for 100% accuracy, but it still makes your data evaluation process fast and hassle-free. More so, AI can help suggest ideas for your users to improve engagement.
4. Seamless Integration into the Digital Ecosystem
A systematic process is the key to nurture business innovation. Whilst an ideation platform is emerging as one of the most sustainable ways to encourage idea generation from all levels across an organisation, it’s the seamless integration into the digital ecosystem that is much anticipated.
Innovate through Microsoft Teams
Encourage your employees to share ideas through the digital tools they use every day.
Businesses have to consider the value creation when choosing crowdsource software. The wrong solution could adversely impact the entire innovative and collaborative culture of the ecosystem.
Pro-tip:Choose an idea system that integrates into the commonly available digital product like the Microsoft Office 365 product suite. This allows you to engage with ideas through products that people have been leveraging to analyse and interpret data.
Over to you…
While idea management is simply defined as a systematic process for the development of ideas, it is highly essential for an organisation to value innovation and create an effective method for realising idea management. In fact, top management should hear the ideas of their employees from the lowest of the hierarchic strata. This is because you never know from where the most brilliant of ideas may bloom.
Remember, creating an effective process for idea management is the essence of any ideation platform. The right crowdsource software solution should cater to the specific needs around idea generation, do away with the impasses of poor communication and deal with the biases in decision-making.
So you didn’t even name one idea management software package?
Thanks for your comment Clint. I obviously would always recommend Wide Ideas – Idea Management Software, as this article was wrote on their site, but I wanted to come from more of a neutral standpoint and look at the characteristics people should look for when buying idea management software.