Any company that really wants to be successful should have an Innovation Process built into their corporate structure. Many companies think they do. I hate to be the one to tell you, but most Innovation Process strategies are either bad suggestion scheme products that leave you empty-handed or cheap “idea buckets” that gather ideas willy-nilly from employees, customers, the general public, even your competitors with no way of managing or evaluating them. Hardly effective or innovative…
Fuelled by increased interest among organizations to team up with customers and partners, software for supporting open innovation is emerging. With innovation software, innovation workers are knowledge enabled – stimulating creative, breakthrough thinking across the product life-cycle from market planning and early product conception through to detailed engineering, manufacturing execution and after-market support.
Innovation software helps innovation workers overcome the challenge of psychological inertia – the myopic thinking that comes from being overly influenced by historical behavior or trends that prevents us from considering the broadest scope of alternatives. Innovation software also helps communicate market requirements and product design capabilities across disparate communities, understand how to prioritize and leveraging knowledge and existing resources, and accelerates creative problem solving.
Jenni (http://www.jenniusa.net/) utilizes idea campaigns. An idea campaign is a call for innovation to answer a specific need. You present an innovation challenge and set a reward and send it out. You can define who takes part, by department, location, etc… This allows you to target idea campaigns to specific relevant groups. For instance, you may want to pose a highly technical innovation challenge exclusively to R&D and a sales budget challenge to both accounting and sales by region. You collect ideas, during which others can collaborate and give feedback, building onto ideas they like. In the next phase you, and your team, conduct a formal evaluation to identify the ideas with the greatest innovation potential. At the end of the campaign you are ready to implement that new innovation.
OneDesk (http://www.onedesk.com/) is social software that connects employees, partners and customers to the product or service development process. It consists of a suite of applications including social media monitoring, feedback management, innovation and ideas management, customer service, requirements management, project portfolio management, product roadmapping and issue tracking. With OneDesk, you will build the right product or service faster and more efficiently.
Used every day by the world’s leading brands including major Retail, Healthcare, Financial, Technology, Government, Insurance, Utilities and Pharmaceutical companies, SpigitEngage (http://www.spigit.com/solutions/products/spigitengage) is the enterprise platform built for internal innovation communities. SpigitEngage activates your crowd by integrating emergent social collaboration with traditional workflow and analytics, enabling purposeful social innovation that drives results for your business. With Spigit’s ability to activate crowds, companies are able to connect employees, engage communities with incentives, rewards, and participation, and drive results by moving ideas through execution quickly and effectively, SpigitEngage helps you extract actionable business data for cost savings, revenue-generation, product development, process improvements, and more.
Invention Machine’s Goldfire software (http://inventionmachine.com/products-and-services/innovation-software/) informs decision-making across the product lifecycle. Integrating world-class semantic search capabilities, a powerful collaboration framework, and proven problem-solving and concept generation tools, Goldfire connects innovation and knowledge workers to one another and to the experts, knowledge, trends and methods that accelerate productivity and advance innovation.