Simply striving for innovation isn’t quite enough. Choosing innovation software features or a platform and seem to make things a bit more complicated while getting started. What should you look for in features? What’s important and what isn’t? All questions that we can easily assist you in answering and help you move forward quicker with your innovation strategy.

 

The right innovation software features are key to the success of your strategy. With the right software, your innovation efforts should feel streamlined, effortless and, ultimately, effective. There seems to be 10 features of interest that you’ll want to look for while choosing your software.

 

1. A Branded Microsite

A branded microsite helps maintain your brands image while launching your innovation challenges, whether internal or external. Although, this is more important for external challenges. This ensures you maintain control over your branding always and further pushes that image when it comes to innovation so that your audience is aware of your efforts. You become the brand that is pushing for innovation and a better world. Something I believe all customers would not only love to see, but love to contribute to as well.

 

 

 

2. Ability to Launch Innovation Challenges

Launching challenges is the corner stone of an innovation platform. Although you will most likely work with your innovation team (from the platform) to effectively do so, having this as an option is a huge plus. Challenges allow your innovation efforts to focus in on a given idea so that all submissions revolve around it. As an example; Say you wanted to launch a new line of scented soaps, but unlike anything seen so far in the market. Launches a challenge focusing in on increasing some aspect would be better suited than a generic challenge. You can require that all submissions include some form of microencapsulation that would assist in the scent of the soap being released hours after use for longer benefits to the user.

 

3. Single Sign-On Capability

 

Employees, community members, end users, project administrators and other important stakeholders all deserve the chance to contribute. eZassi permits secure external sign on so that authorized participants can all play their part. Customize your content to suit different audiences and share ideas more readily. This should be key when looking at innovation software features.

 

4. Intuitive Dashboard

Everyone loves a good dashboard, but not because they are pretty. They tell us key information and useful data that we can quickly analyze and act on. An effective dashboard should allow you to easily glance over your innovation challenge efforts and see how things are moving along, how many ideas are in each stage and what you should be doing next to effectively move your innovation efforts forward.

 

5. Unstructured Data Capturing and Filtering

You’ll most likely be taking on a large amount of data depending on your challenge and whether it is internal or external, but what is most important is what you can do with this new data moving forward. You want a platform that can allow you to choose which metrics are important, which to measure and how to best filter each submission in order of your priority.

 

6. Gamified Collaboration

Gamification, especially when it comes to internal innovation efforts, is a key feature in ensuring collaboration and use. Not every employee will be as thrilled as you’ll be when launching new challenges, but giving an incentive could easily change that.

 

7. Idea Process Management

Organization is a must when dealing with idea submissions. Even more so is keeping track of where each submission is and should be along the process. You wouldn’t want to have every submission in a spreadsheet and manually manage each one and mentally keep track. Instead, let code do that for you so you can focus on what matters: driving our innovation forward.

 

8. Idea Scoring

This is something we’ve begun to implement recently that we’ve found to be a tremendous benefit to ourselves and as well as our clients. Once you know what metrics are most important and can easily measure them, scoring becomes the next wonderful thing. Now we can easily scan new submissions and prioritize them based on their score. This ensures we are being more effective with our time.

 

9. Idea Reporting

Along those same lines, we want to easily pull up a report of an ideas submission to review. Having this information easily accessible and organized is key. By using a reporting feature, we can easily distil all of the information submitted by the expert into a couple of pages that can then be emailed or printed out and given to those who should see it.

 

10. IP Risk Mitigation

Protecting yourself and your submitters is very important, but many of platforms seem to forget about this simple little feature. By having an IP protection feature you show your submitters that what they have is valuable and will do whatever you can to make them comfortable enough to give you their ideas. This all boils down to the structure of your submission survey and how questions can and cannot be asked.