To thrive in a rapidly changing environment, most businesses depend on innovation. Therefore, you need a system to help you collect ideas from different sources. The right system should also control and manage the process of developing the best business ideas.

As such, it’ll save you the trouble of duplicating the work done by the teams involved. Plus, it will make it easier and faster for you to filter ideas from many sources. It will also help you focus on all the sources of ideas, including customer feedback.

Generally, you can use innovation software in these three areas of idea generation.

Idea Capture

Generally, every stage of ideation matters. But if you don’t capture every idea first, you may mess up the entire process. After all, developing an unprofitable idea can be a costly mistake.

For example, if you don’t include customer feedback on support service, you might have many first-time buyers and no repeat sales.

That’s why there’s software to capture ideas from different sources. It does so by assigning access points based on the role of the idea source. You can also use it to capture business ideas from external partners and customers. Further, idea capture can use different formats depending on the information needed. For example,

A Structured Form

It captures specific details that can help reduce the time spent analyzing ideas. However, it can be limiting and may not capture some ideas. After all, you can’t restrict some ideas to a question-and-answer format.

For example, you want to get many ideas from your employees during product development. The ideas may be in pictures, drawings, or formulas. A structured form is more suitable when getting customer feedback.

Open Submission

The best way to capture someone’s creativity is by using an unstructured format. You can ask employees, external experts, or even customers to submit their ideas guided by some terms and conditions. And to protect those ideas, you can state who owns the intellectual property.

Another way to capture ideas is by using a challenge-based approach. It can be a structured or unstructured challenge.

Idea Management

After gathering the ideas, you can start filtering and sorting one after the other. With this software, you can use predefined criteria to sort and rate ideas. For example, since the ideas are from different business sectors, you can sort them by brand.

Next, you can score ideas for each brand, from the ones you’d like to invest in first to the least likely. That’ll help your team focus on what you want to handle first instead of wasting resources only to reconsider the idea later. You’ll also have many ideas to revisit later, which ensures none of the idea-generation resources go to waste.

You may not even spend time and resources getting new ideas for a while since you’ll have enough. Plus, idea management makes the process transparent for all involved, as you can look back and see where you started using a road map.

Idea Advancement

After scoring a couple of ideas suited to your business goals, you can start planning how to implement them. The software’s advancement features may help you create a stage-gate workflow. That’ll be a workflow based on criteria like the department or brand.

From there, you can have a central dashboard per idea so that the team and reviewers can collaborate. Also, you can share documents and media files there. Further, the workflow history becomes an evaluation tool when assessing the team’s progress.

In summary, using innovative software is essential for business growth. It also makes it easy for the team and external partners to communicate throughout the three stages above. Without it, you’ll have a stressful idea-capturing process and possibly lose track of the idea development stages.