Innovation platforms should help organizations gather and nurture high-quality ideas into innovative solutions.
But in reality, most innovation platforms focus too much on idea collection and lack the workflows to evaluate, validate, prioritize, and transform ideas into solutions. As a result, ideas stall and their potential remains unrealized.
Other innovation solutions just give you access to their platform with some basic training, but don’t help you in establishing innovation processes within your organization. You’re left to figure out how to engage employees, secure leadership buy-in, hand ideas over to the core, and tackle other operational challenges on your own.
Based on our decade of experience as innovation professionals, an effective innovation platform should tick five main boxes to overcome these limitations and truly help organizations turn ideas into solutions:
Features to focus ideation on specific priorities: Many platforms support idea collection with an open call for any and all ideas. Although this can uncover unexpected insights, it mainly results in random ideas unrelated to the organization’s priorities. An effective innovation platform should align all employees’ ideation efforts with the organization’s priorities.
Features to refine ideas using the collective expertise of the entire workforce: First-draft ideas are often flawed and incomplete. So, an effective innovation platform should help refine ideas by encouraging employees across departments to co-create with the original idea author.
Workflows that structure post-ideation tasks: We’ve noticed that organizations usually struggle to turn ideas into working solutions. To combat this, innovation software should offer detailed workflows that guide idea evaluation, validation, and prioritization, and also improve the handover of ideas to the core.
Innovation professionals to support you: Implementing innovation processes inside large organizations typically comes with resistors such as bureaucracy, lack of management buy-in, and uninterested employees, among others. As a result, innovation solutions must do more than provide a platform; they should be your partner in navigating operational challenges.
In this article, we discuss seven top-rated innovation platforms. We begin by covering how our innovation platform, InnovationCast, meets the four criteria listed above. Then, we review additional options such as Qmarkets, Brightidea, Wazoku, and HYPE Innovation.
InnovationCast has implemented productive innovation processes for Visa, DHL, Vodafone, and others in under four weeks. Book a 25-minute demo to learn how we can do the same for you.
1. InnovationCast
An Innovation Platform That Supports Ideas from Collection to Implementation and Impact Tracking
As we shared in our founding story, we created InnovationCast because existing innovation providers didn’t meet all four criteria mentioned above.
We designed InnovationCast to:
Source high-quality ideas aligned with the innovation strategy
Encourage co-creation among employees
Turn raw ideas into shippable solutions using in-depth workflows
Act as an integrated innovation team helping you overcome operational and technical challenges and implement a productive innovation process within your organization.
Let’s dive deeper into each of these four factors below.
Factor #1: Features to Focus Ideation on Specific Priorities
Organizations can collect ideas in two ways:
Innovation Challenges — A top-down approach where management informs employees of current priorities and invites them to submit relevant ideas.
Category-based “Always On” — A bottom-up approach that enables users to alert management to new opportunities and threats.
Innovation Challenges Provide Context on the Organization’s Priorities
Innovation Challenges are time-constrained calls for users to submit ideas on specific topics.
Innovation managers, department managers, or any stakeholder can create innovation challenges to source ideas aligned with their priorities. InnovationCast automatically notifies users to participate.
This approach enables organizations to focus the creative brainpower of all employees and outside users on their key priorities.
Unlike other innovation solutions that offer little support beyond digital infrastructure, we help you draft effective challenges, provide feedback on how to improve them, and discuss strategies for promoting them internally. This guidance is based on our 10+ years of innovation experience and know-how, learning what works and what doesn’t.
For example, we typically help our clients:
Determine which priorities in the innovation strategy to address with challenges first.
Clearly define and frame the problem.
Get employees to understand how they can benefit from responding to the challenge.
Increase awareness of their challenge.
Offer tips that work well for us (e.g., focus on a specific point, get a quote from a sponsor or major stakeholder, outline evaluation criteria, showcase rewards for winners and runners-up).
In addition, when someone responds to an open innovation challenge, InnovationCast can detect when they are about to submit an idea similar to one already submitted. It will then suggest the user co-create with the original author to improve their idea. This way, you don’t have to filter through duplicate ideas.
Read more: 6 Innovation Challenge Software + Comparison
Uncover New Insights with Our Category-Based “Always On” Feature
That said, open calls for ideas still play a role in an effective innovation program because they allow users to notify top management about new opportunities and threats not present in the current innovation strategy.
This is why we added the category-based “Always On” feature to InnovationCast.
Unlike traditional open calls for ideas, “Always On” requires users to bucket their ideas into topics defined by top management, ensuring that all ideas align with broader areas of interest.
For example, the screenshot below shows a hospital asking users to sort their ideas into healthcare technology, infection control, patient experience, and sustainable healthcare.
Read more: How to Implement an Effective Idea Generation Process in Your Organization
Factor #2: Features to Improve Ideas with Expertise from the Entire Workforce
It’s rare for someone to submit a perfect idea from the start. Even the best ideas require further iteration and exploration, as there are typically aspects the author didn’t consider or information they forgot to include.
To refine first-draft ideas, innovation managers can display them on the InnovationCast activity feed, making them visible to all users upon logging in.
InnovationCast encourages users to analyze the details of these ideas and say whether they believe they are “Good,” “Not so good,” or “Undecided.”
InnovationCast encourages users to provide feedback and team up with the original idea author to refine ideas.
This way, organizations can refine ideas with the expertise of employees across the organization. Employees from engineering, finance, marketing, IT, and other departments contribute to refining ideas, leaving evaluators with more complete concepts.
Factor #3: Workflows That Structure Idea Evaluation, Validation & Prioritization
In our experience, most innovation platforms over-index idea collection and lack in-depth workflow engines that outline how to evaluate, validate, and prioritize ideas. They typically have a basic workflow, such as collect → evaluate → implement/terminate, but this is impractical if you need to map assumptions, run experiments, bring in different stakeholders, or have multiple stage gates and decision stages.
This leaves ideas unrealized and never developed into innovations that produce value for the organization.
On the other hand, many platforms offer complete configurability. They can create advanced workflows from scratch and add any stage that you want, with different conditional triggers and settings. However, these solutions are very expensive because the provider has to build the entire platform from scratch.
To solve both problems, we designed InnovationCast from the outset with workflow configurability in mind, so you get the same configurability as a custom-built solution for a fraction of the cost.
This approach has helped companies like DHL increase implemented ideas by 14% in just four weeks.
InnovationCast Workflows are Completely Customizable
InnovationCast workflows are completely customizable, allowing you to add, change, or remove evaluation criteria, business scorecards, validation tasks, automated notifications and rewards, conditional triggers, Metered Funding, and more. We’ll help create these workflows, but you can easily configure them using our no-code workflow editor.
InnovationCast also offers numerous workflows so that you aren’t limited to pushing all ideas through a single, cookie-cutter workflow. We have workflows for product ideas, business model ideas, supply chain ideas, technological ideas, and more.
Here’s an example of a continuous improvement workflow:
Our workflows usually start by showing idea evaluators what evaluation model and criteria to use based on the type of idea they are evaluating. With this guidance, they can identify high-potential ideas while also determining which ideas to table.
Then, for high-risk, high-uncertainty ideas, InnovationCast may suggest assembling validation teams to run experiments and test ideas before implementation.
For instance, if the organization is uncertain about its capability to develop the product, we may recommend creating a prototype or a Spike first. If customer demand is unclear, we could suggest setting up a website with a fake brand name and running ads to measure how many people check out.
Finally, our workflows include KPIs that validation teams should measure based on the type of idea, along with minimum success criteria to help them determine whether to proceed with launching the idea. All the data from experiments are aggregated in the InnovationCast reporting dashboard for top management to see and decide which to proceed with.
Factor #4: A Team of Innovation Professionals to Help You Overcome Operational Challenges
Most platforms focus on providing digital infrastructure, such as idea portals, voting tools, and dashboards, but don’t help you implement innovation processes within your organization.
This is problematic because implementing nimble innovation processes inside large, bureaucratic organizations is extremely challenging, especially if the organization has never innovated before. Innovation managers typically face operational and technical challenges, including securing leadership buy-in, navigating bureaucracy, engaging employees, and validating high-risk ideas, among others.
It’s uncommon for innovation managers, even the most skilled, to handle an entire initiative single-handedly. Instead, innovation managers who implement successful innovation processes usually have the support of a team of innovation professionals from different backgrounds.
With this in mind, we don’t just give you access to our platform and leave you to figure things out on your own. We’re like your integrated innovation team, always ready to listen to your struggles and offer advice. For example, when we asked Matt Chapman, innovation manager at Gowling WLG, about his experience with InnovationCast, he said:
“I’ve worked with many other providers and there’s very much a hard line, where the relationship stops without significant additional cost. With InnovationCast, this wasn’t the case. They are always there to offer guidance and share their thoughts on new approaches or strategies I’m considering.”
Read more: 6 Steps to an Effective Idea Management Process
Additional Tools to Help Establish an Effective Innovation Program
Educational Materials That Get People to Participate
Innovation managers often struggle to get people to participate in innovation efforts, which is why many innovation programs fail.
We’ve learned that the main reason for this is that employees have a fundamental misunderstanding of innovation. They think innovation is for scientists and engineers working on revolutionary ideas, and the organization doesn’t need their input.
Employees don’t realize that small, continuous improvements to live products, services, and processes are the most common form of innovation and that their ideas can significantly improve the organization’s bottom line.
So, we designed InnovationCast with educational materials to address those concerns and myths. Our system automatically delivers these materials to users via email in manageable increments. This helps organizations drive high participation in a short amount of time.
This is a shortcoming of many innovation tools. They fail to sufficiently debunk the myth that innovation isn't for everyone, resulting in low participation levels.
To boost participation rates, InnovationCast sends users emails when:
They have been inactive for a certain period of time.
New challenges are released.
Their input is needed to evaluate or validate an idea.
They have submitted an idea, updating them on its status (whether it is being evaluated, validated, or launched).
Read more: How to Encourage Innovation in the Workplace
Signals & Scouting
To help organizations stay current on industry and competitor news, we added a trend management feature called Signals & Scouting to InnovationCast.
Signals & Scouting encourages users across the organization to share news about important opportunities or threats with colleagues and managers. This improves competitiveness, as everyone stays on top of competitor news, emerging technologies, new businesses, and industry trends.
When users log into InnovationCast, they can see these resources and discuss whether they merit action, helping generate new ideas.
Innovation Radars
Innovation Radars complement our Signals & Scouting feature by allowing users to visualize all the submitted Signals across the organization, categorized by different business areas and importance levels. If innovation managers and stakeholders notice radars with little activity, they can encourage users to gather news in those areas.
Badges & Rewards
Users spend hours brainstorming, researching, and submitting ideas, and if they aren’t rewarded for their hard work, they may be discouraged from participating in the future.
With this in mind, we added a badges and rewards program to InnovationCast that helps organizations maintain high participation rates. Organizations can reward users when they complete tasks like responding to a challenge with a high-quality idea or improving a colleague’s idea.
Organizations can reward users with anything, including cash prizes, PTO, gift cards, or movie tickets.
What InnovationCast Clients Say
Here’s what innovation managers say about our platform:
Set Up an Innovation Process Within Just Four Weeks Using InnovationCast
Companies like DHL, Vodafone, ING, Novo Nordisk, and Visa have used InnovationCast to establish innovation programs that gather high-quality ideas and turn them into shippable solutions.
Because we provide guidance (workflows, frameworks, and templates) for every part of the innovation process, it has enabled companies like DHL to increase idea submissions by 67% and implemented ideas by 14%.
Schedule a free demo with our team to learn more about our innovation platform.
2. Qmarkets
Qmarkets is an idea management platform built for larger organizations looking to quickly establish a culture of innovation among their workforce. Qmarkets comes with features required for organizations to manage the entire lifecycle of an idea, from idea collection to refinement, validation, and impact tracking.
During onboarding, their customer success team and innovation consultants will jump on a call with you to discuss your innovation strategy (or help establish one if needed) and tweak their software around your needs.
Features
Idea management: Innovation managers can collect and store ideas on specific topics within Qmarkets’ idea management system. Then, they can give other users access to them so everyone can co-create.
Continuous improvement: Innovation managers can source ideas on how to improve existing products, services, and processes.
Trend management: Innovation managers can encourage users to share industry and competitor news they believe everyone else inside the company should know about.
Technology scouting: Innovation managers can use Qmarkets’ collaboration tools to connect with startups, universities, incubators, and other companies to build solutions that solve complex problems.
Innovation portfolio: Innovation managers can get a 360-degree view of all the projects currently being worked on. They can see their stage (evaluation, validation, implementation) and track their impact.
3. Brightidea
Brightidea is an idea and innovation management platform that empowers organizations — including enterprise companies, startups, universities, non-profits, government organizations — to utilize their entire workforce to come up with innovative ideas that solve current problems.
When you sign up, their team joins you on a call to get deeper insight into the goals you’re looking to achieve by setting up an innovation program. Then, they tailor their challenge, co-creation, workflows, and reporting features around these considerations.
Features
Idea box: Brightidea’s idea collection feature allows users inside and outside the company to propose ways to address priorities and initiatives.
Program: Innovation managers can educate users and external partners on the innovation strategy and the types of ideas they require. Then, they can call everyone to submit relevant ideas.
Lab: This is Brightidea’s idea management dashboard. Innovation managers, stakeholders, and employees can view all ideas here, evaluate them, and run experiments to test them before sending them off to the project management office for implementation.
Transformation: This project management feature lets organizations manage innovation projects. They can give teams various tasks, assign deadlines, and allocate resources, all within a single dashboard.
Ecosystem: This is where innovation managers and stakeholders can connect with startups and enterprise companies to co-create and connect with investors and sponsors to fund innovation projects. This improves the sustainability of the innovation program.
However, it’s important to note that many reviews talk about how users require a fundamental understanding of CSS and HTML to fully customize features and utilize the platform.
4. Wazoku
Wazoku is a cloud-based innovation and idea management software. They have worked with companies like Microsoft, HSBC, Barclays, and Allianz to establish organization-wide innovation programs.
They use various features to crowdsource ideas from employees and then evaluate and validate them before implementation. Many users say that Wazoku will consult with you during onboarding to better understand your innovation goals and set up the platform around those goals.
Features
Internal innovation: This is an ecosystem of tools that allows innovation managers to gather high-quality ideas from employees and external stakeholders, incentivize them to participate with a rewards system, and use training materials to educate employees on the benefits of innovation.
Co-creation: Where employees and outside users collaborate to improve existing ideas.
Open innovation: Where innovation managers and stakeholders can access outside talent to find solutions to organizational pain points, priorities, and initiatives.
Technology scouting: Where innovation managers can discover new technologies and find startups to partner with.
Innovation networks: Innovation managers and stakeholders can utilize Wazoku’s hub of innovation teams to work together and develop the latest solutions, which are displayed at Wazoku's yearly showcase.
5. HYPE Innovation
HYPE Innovation is end-to-end innovation management software meant to help organizations of all sizes generate high-quality ideas, realize the best concepts, and bring them to life with thorough validation workflows and project management features.
HYPE’s suite of products offers strategic partnership management software and a whiteboard tool alongside their traditional open innovation platform.
Features
Strategy: HYPE’s team of consultants will help you establish an innovation strategy by identifying areas of the business you want to improve.
Ideation: HYPE offers a few ideation tools, such as always open and time-limited calls for ideas that innovation managers can use to spark creative thinking among employees.
Partnering: Innovation managers and stakeholders can use this feature to identify business and investment opportunities.
Projects: Innovation departments can manage entire validation projects within a single dashboard. HYPE has workflows that help teams determine what to do to validate ideas and project management features to launch ideas.
6. Planbox
Planbox, now part of HYPE following a recent acquisition, is a comprehensive innovation management platform designed to support the full lifecycle of innovation, from idea capture through evaluation and execution. Their team offers both the software and pre-onboarding guidance to tailor the system to your workflows, making it suitable for organizations of all sizes and across a wide range of industries.
Features
Technology scouting: Track emerging technologies that align with your strategic innovation priorities.
Corporate venturing: Explore potential investment and partnership opportunities to expand your innovation pipeline.
Challenge-driven innovation: Pinpoint defined problems or opportunities and engage contributors to co-create viable solutions.
Open innovation: Leverage crowdsourcing to collect ideas from employees, customers, partners, and external contributors.
Agile central: A project management environment for assessing, advancing, and implementing selected ideas.
Portfolio central: Manage multiple innovation initiatives as a coordinated portfolio to maintain visibility and alignment.
7. Sideways 6
Sideways 6 is an idea management platform designed to plug directly into the tools your teams already use, such as Microsoft Teams and Workplace from Meta, making it easier to involve employees in innovation efforts and encourage collaboration. By meeting employees where they work, Sideways6 reduces friction, speeds up adoption, and simplifies onboarding.
Features
Idea capture: Gather spontaneous insights through integrations with platforms like Yammer and Workplace from Meta.
Idea management: Organize, qualify, and monitor ideas using structured, customizable workflows.
Idea shortlisting: Route ideas for evaluation by peer groups or dedicated review panels.
Project development: Evolve selected ideas into actionable projects and monitor their progress.
Engagement tools: Use Sideways 6’s library of templates to deliver personalized, large-scale communications.
Success measurement: Access evaluation metrics and dashboards to understand performance and impact.
Get Started
You can learn more about how InnovationCast can help your organization establish a vibrant innovation program by scheduling a free demo with our team.
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