Idea management software is becoming increasingly popular, and for good reason. This is because they allow businesses to be systematic about how they innovate. Today, almost everything is in the cloud, and this means that businesses also have the opportunity to look further afield for their idea management tools, being able to find something that meets not just their particular needs, but also their budget.

What Is Idea Management Software?

Idea management software is best described as a turn key system, which is often provided on the cloud. Its goal is to make sure that you easily and quickly create a process of innovation that helps to improve your organizations. To do this, all these software packages usually have a number of key features, which includes:

• The ability to create a web portal under your brand, where you can manage ideas through.
• The ability to determine who can have access to which parts of the portal. Certain areas may be public, for instance, whereas others may be restricted.
• Enabling people to submit ideas into the system.
• Ensuring different ideas can get grouped into relevant categories.
• Allowing people to view, comment, and vote on submitted ideas.
• Enabling participants to work together, so that they can improve submitted ideas.
• Finding out which ideas are the most popular.
• Evaluating the various ideas using predetermined criteria that are relevant to you.
• Selecting ideas that may need testing, or even implementing.
• The ability to ensure users know what has happened to their idea.
• The ability to provide rewards to various participants, which usually is some sort of virtual reward.

Who Uses Idea Management Software?

The amount of organizations that use this type of software is almost countless. However, two of the most famous are Dell IdeaStorm, by Dell, and My Starbucks Ideas, by Starbucks. Both of these platforms are targeted specifically at consumers. However, this doesn’t have to be the case. For instance, other businesses use portals and platforms to speak to employees within their organization, to increase B2B customer involvement, to speak with suppliers and other stakeholders, and so on. Either way, the software is there to create a systematic way to innovate within an organization, making the chance of the ideas becoming successful much larger as well.

Because idea management and innovation is now so popular, there are countless organizations that have created software tools. You do, therefore, have to make sure that you properly compare the market in order to make sure that you find one that fits your specific needs. As such, your very first innovative project should be one that determines what the needs of your organization actually are: what do you want to innovate, where do you want to innovate, why do you want to innovate, how do you want to innovate, and when do you want to innovate? Another important question is just how much you are happy to pay for the system as well, although the most important thing is that you get good value for money.