Open innovation software is meant to help innovation managers:
Invite subject matter experts, customers, suppliers, partners, and other outside users to submit high-quality ideas relevant to the innovation strategy.
Encourage outside users to improve ideas, point out any areas of concern, and brainstorm solutions.
Work with others to validate and implement promising ideas by pushing them through specific evaluation workflows.
However, while there are countless open innovation software solutions, they typically fall short in one of the categories above. Some platforms make it easy to onboard outside users, but they lack strategic idea collection features. Others offer effective idea collection but don’t have the workflows to validate and launch different types of ideas.
So, we wrote this guide to help innovation managers choose the best open innovation software that meets the criteria above. We’ll start with our platform, InnovationCast, and then cover 4 other alternatives: Braineet, Agorize, ITONICS, and HYPE.
1. InnovationCast
Build a Strong Innovation Ecosystem of Internal Teams & External Stakeholders
InnovationCast is a collaborative innovation management platform designed to help users manage their innovation process from beginning to end. Users can collect, assess, validate, and launch ideas within a single platform.
Our platform supports unlimited users — both internal and external — so anyone can join your innovation hub to pitch ideas, provide feedback, or contribute to innovation projects.
InnovationCast is also fully customizable, so users can tailor their evaluation workflows, idea collection approach, and other settings around their innovation processes.
Our customer success team shows you how to harness new perspectives by onboarding outside subject matter experts and encouraging them to submit ideas.
We then walk you through our collaboration features, which allow you to centralize all ideas inside a single hub and invite selected users to view them and provide feedback. Then, everyone can work together to identify points of contention and find innovative solutions.
Finally, we show you how to run experiments to validate an idea's feasibility, track the outcomes of these experiments to understand if an idea is worth pursuing, and eventually plan implementation tasks to launch the best ideas.
Below, we discuss each of these features in more detail.
Features to Collect High-Quality Ideas
InnovationCast has two targeted idea collection features:
"Always On" Categories — where users can submit ideas relevant to innovation priorities at any time.
Challenges — where managers can collect ideas on urgent topics.
"Always On" Allows Users to Submit Ideas at Any Time
Innovation managers can use our "Always On" idea collection feature to call users (employees in other departments or customers, partners, suppliers, etc.) to submit ideas on certain innovation priorities.
When creating an “Always On” posting, innovation managers can define topics of interest so users understand the company's priorities and know what types of ideas to submit.
Internal and external users can access InnovationCast and submit ideas 24/7, any time inspiration strikes, and specify which area of the innovation strategy it relates to.
This helps innovation managers gather an extensive list of ideas relevant to company priorities and filter out less-relevant ideas before they are submitted.
Additionally, innovation managers can create questionnaires to gather more details about ideas. This encourages users to expand upon important points such as how their idea is beneficial, how likely it is to succeed, and what resources it may require, resulting in more carefully considered ideas.
For instance, let's say a healthcare innovation department has four priorities: finding healthcare technologies, improving infection control, optimizing patient experiences, and offering more sustainable healthcare services.
With "Always On," innovation managers can require users to categorize their ideas into one of the above categories before submitting them.
They could then ask the following questions:
How does your idea improve patient care?
What existing technologies inspired your idea?
What resources are required to develop and implement your idea?
Have you considered any potential limitations?
This gets users thinking about how their idea can benefit patients, what resources it may require, and any obstacles development teams need to prepare for.
Innovation Challenges Allow Innovation Managers to Collect Ideas on Urgent Topics
Innovation Challenges are postings about more specific priorities or initiatives that invite users to problem-solve together. Innovation managers can include detailed descriptions and attach resources such as customer interviews, research papers, and survey data to each challenge so everyone understands the priority, leading to higher-quality idea submissions.
Challenges are time-constrained — which creates a sense of urgency and encourages users to find solutions to company priorities before “time runs out.” This makes challenges a good alternative to “Always On” when collecting ideas on more pressing issues.
Read more: 7 Strategies to Get Innovative Ideas from Employees
Features to Test and Implement Ideas
After ideas have been refined using the collective intelligence of employees and outside experts, innovation managers can validate and launch them with our configurable idea evaluation workflows and project manager.
Configurable Idea Evaluation Workflows
Our idea evaluation workflows guide innovation teams through the tasks they need to complete to validate ideas. In our experience, pushing ideas through these workflows is an essential step to ensuring they are turned into products and processes that can benefit the company.
However, it’s important to remember that different ideas require different implementation steps. For example, launching a new AI feature has an entirely different roadmap than improving internal communication processes.
We have workflow templates for different types of ideas, whether innovation managers are creating new business processes, launching software products, or testing alternative business models.
These evaluation workflows are fully customizable. Innovation managers can rearrange, add, and remove steps without writing code or contacting our team. This way, they have the foundations to validate and launch any type of idea.
For example, say the innovation department inside a coffee company is looking for ways to improve the design of their espresso machine. A customer submits an idea for an alarm clock feature that automatically starts the morning brew at a set time.
In this scenario, the innovation department could:
Call support teams to conduct research interviews with customers to understand if there's a market for this feature.
If so, the R&D team could design a prototype and begin the testing phase by inviting customers to use it.
Customers can vote on what they think of the new coffee machine and share any feedback.
The R&D team can then use this feedback to iterate upon their design.
This ensures that teams know what tasks or experiments they need to complete, whether it's interviewing customers, finding suppliers, or developing the actual prototype. Customers and other outside users are also notified when their feedback is required, which keeps implementations moving forward.
Read more: Best Practices to Evaluate Innovation Ideas
Project and Portfolio Manager
Once innovation managers have run experiments to test the validity of an idea, they can use our project manager to support the implementation process.
Inside this project manager, innovation managers can create implementation tasks and assign them to teams, employees, and perhaps even outside users. Then, they can track the progress of these tasks and check if they are on track to launch. If not, they can spot delays early on and call others to help.
Using the espresso machine example above, if customers love the new brewing feature, the company could start production by calling the procurement team to find suppliers who can source the necessary materials at scale. Then, they can schedule the R&D team to begin manufacturing the new coffee machine.
Innovation managers can also use our portfolio manager to view all previously implemented projects. They can see which ideas succeeded, which ones fell short of expectations, and any mistakes that led to these unsuccessful implementations.
Managers can learn from these mistakes to improve the implementation processes of current and future projects.
Additional Features to Encourage Innovation
We added the following features to InnovationCast to help managers build a more sustainable innovation program:
Signal & Scouting
Badges & Rewards
Onboarding emails
Badges & Rewards
Our solution has a badges and rewards system innovation managers can use to encourage employees and outside users to stay involved with innovation efforts.
When employees hit milestones such as submitting a certain number of high-quality ideas, managers can publicly display badges on their profiles for other users to see.
They can also award users with points, which they can redeem for gift cards, PTO, cash prizes, movie tickets, or any other type of reward. (Innovation managers choose rewards, and users can see what is available to redeem, so they can save points and “work up to” prizes.)
Onboarding Emails
Innovation managers usually struggle to get outside subject matter experts onboarded and using their new innovation management software.
This is why we added onboarding emails to InnovationCast. These emails contain training materials on how to use InnovationCast features; respond to challenges, provide feedback, post signals, and more. These emails are automatically sent to new users so they can join the platform and start contributing.
In addition, innovation managers can send periodic reminder emails about ongoing initiatives or tips to get involved to encourage participation. Lastly, InnovationCast automatically sends “nudge” emails when users are inactive for an extended time period.
Read more: 6 Steps to Implement Innovation Management in an Organization
Book a Free InnovationCast Demo
Book a free demo with our customer success team to learn more about how InnovationCast can help you gather insights from outside experts and turn them into products and processes.
2. Braineet
Braineet offers an “all-in-one” innovation management platform that allows users to invite outside experts and customers to submit ideas, and work with internal employees to improve them.
Braineet's innovation platform can be broken up into four modules:
Collect and maintain data — Innovation managers can create open calls for ideas and time-bound challenges that prompt users to submit ideas. From here, managers can automatically bucket ideas into specific categories and forward them to their respective departments.
Innovation processes — Innovation managers can push ideas through workflows to determine their feasibility and launch them. Then, they can use Gantt charts to manage project timelines and monitor progress.
Real-time visual reporting — Innovation managers can generate detailed reports to track project KPIs, turn them into easy-to-understand graphs, and use them to make business decisions.
Customization and flexibility — Innovation managers can tweak evaluation workflows, scale the platform as their team grows, and integrate Braineet with other software systems.
Pricing
Braineet offers three pricing plans:
Crowdsourcing ($120/month) — Managers can call users to submit ideas.
Workflows ($160/month) — Managers can create custom workflows to launch ideas.
Both ($280/month) — Managers can access both of the features mentioned above.
3. Agorize
Agorize is an end-to-end enterprise innovation management platform that has worked with companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Michelin. They allow managers to centralize innovation efforts and invite employees and outside users to contribute.
During onboarding, Agorize's customer success team meets with you to discuss your innovation goals, and then tailors the platform around these considerations.
Agorize's feature set can be split up into five sections:
Manage innovation — Innovation managers can invite certain teams to complete tasks required to launch an idea.
Hackathons — Innovation managers can invite programmers from inside and outside the organization to build software products that can potentially solve key problems.
Technology scouting — Innovation managers can call users to help discover the best startups to partner with and co-develop new technologies.
Student challenges — Innovation managers can tap into a pool of over three million students to generate new ideas and improve submitted ones.
Recruit — Innovation managers can scout and engage with the best talent and prompt them to participate in innovation initiatives.
Pricing
Agorize doesn’t display pricing on its website; however, they do have three plans:
Agorize Idea Box — Users can collect ideas from employees and partners.
Agorize Innovation — Users can test and launch approved ideas.
Agorize Hire — Users can hire outside experts to participate in innovation efforts.
4. ITONICS
ITONICS is a highly rated open innovation platform that provides innovation tools for teams of all sizes. Innovation teams can use its idea collection features to source a large number of ideas from employees and external partners, then validate and launch them with evaluation workflows.
In addition to offering innovation software, ITONICS also provides companies with consulting services, where they help managers develop innovation strategies.
These are the core features of ITONICS's innovation management platform:
Radar — Innovation managers can use graphs and tables to visualize industry trends, new technologies, and potential risks.
Insights — Innovation managers can view all insights submitted by employees, organize them from most to least disruptive, and have stakeholders discuss what actions are required, if any.
Collaboration tools — Innovation managers can learn about what outside experts think of new trends, technologies, startups, competitors, and opportunities, and use this to make business decisions.
Foresight templates — Innovation managers can use pre-built templates to guide their validation and implementation process.
AI-powered Signals feed — Innovation managers can use ITONICS' AI-powered technology to uncover relevant industry news.
Pricing
Although ITONICS doesn't list the price of their innovation software publicly, they do have three plans displayed on their website:
Team — for solopreneurs and small teams.
Professional — for more extensive, distributed teams.
Enterprise — for global enterprise companies.
5. HYPE Innovation
HYPE offers consulting services alongside an innovation management platform. HYPE’s consultants can help managers develop an innovation strategy, implement best practices, and invite outside users to join the platform.
From here, users can log in, learn about the innovation strategy, submit ideas, and collaborate with colleagues and outside experts to improve them. Then, innovation managers can use HYPE's evaluation workflows to determine whether an idea is worth implementing and, if so, begin planning the implementation tasks.
The HYPE innovation management platform can be split up into four modules:
Strategy — Innovation managers can develop evaluation roadmaps to evaluate, validate, and launch ideas based on previous mistakes.
Ideation — Innovation managers can call employees and outside subject matter experts to share ideas they believe can benefit the organization.
Partnerships — Innovation managers can learn about potential business opportunities and partner with startups to develop products and processes.
Projects — Innovation managers can create idea evaluation workflows to determine if they should implement an idea or cut it loose.
In addition to this innovation management platform, HYPE also has an idea management software called Viima that offers the features required to collect ideas from employees.
Pricing
HYPE markets all of its innovation products as separate offerings, including its consulting services. In order to get a quote, you’ll need to contact its customer success team.
Build an Extensive, Open Innovation Network with InnovationCast
Our solution has helped companies in a multitude of industries establish effective innovation processes. Some notable clients of ours include DHL, ING, Novo Nordisk, and Visa.
Schedule a demo with our team to see how InnovationCast lets you utilize the insights of internal teams and external users to drive business growth.
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