5 Reasons to Invest in Innovation Management Software

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Translating innovative ideas into successful products is becoming increasingly complex and demanding. Overcoming this challenge is of fundamental importance for the survival of companies in highly contested fields. We share five reasons why investing in innovation management software can help.

Innovation has sped up in the last decades, reshaping and transforming industries and introducing a new logic of competition. Until recently, companies could still develop shortcuts and workarounds to keep up with the pace of change. Eventually, however, it has become impossible for innovation-focused organizations to ignore the need for change—and to create a holistic, profound, and sustainable approach to lay the foundation for the future.

The Role of Digitization in Bringing Innovation to Market

Digitization comes to mind here: Just as products, services, and business models need to be digital so too does the process of their creation. However, technological progress and its implications for product development are just one part of the story. It’s also about how companies position themselves in a dynamic market.

How do organizations handle the overall speed of innovation, as reflected in rapidly changing customer behavior and short product life cycles? How do they react to the dissolution of specific industries, the connection of previously separated business areas, and the emergence of disruptive players? And how do they prepare their organization in the face of growing uncertainties?

As the pressure to keep up, adapt, and find solutions continues to rise, the ability to innovate is vital—with product and organizational innovation being equally important factors. However, knowing what to do is one thing; doing it is another, especially when it’s something complex driving innovation.

For the leading innovators and pioneers in the market, innovation is a fast and agile end-to-end process driven by strategy, culture, and the commitment to always explore new possibilities. But such an ambitious approach is not worth much if a matching framework does not accompany it. The right tools are needed to plan, manage, and implement innovation successfully.

Five Benefits of Innovation Management Software

1. Establish a Digital Infrastructure

Imagine having only one central entry point for a company’s innovation activities. One hub unites everything needed for innovation—ideas, data, or people. Imagine all the resources and skills being easily accessed and used for new projects without any restrictions in time and place. Imagine how fast innovation could be managed this way.

This isn’t an unattainable wish but the exact purpose of innovation management software. It streamlines processes, provides a structure for all assets, and connects relevant innovation dimensions along the value chain. Instead of dealing with many individual solutions across various departments, all capabilities are merged into one powerful tool.

Innovation management software enhances your innovation strategy by equipping it with an infrastructure to meet the requirements of digital times. It helps build bridges between physical and virtual business areas and is a sustainable and effective driver for digital transformation within the organization.

2. Make Innovation a Company Mission

A digital infrastructure allows companies to include more stakeholders in innovation activities without facing additional efforts or costs. They can now efficiently integrate all their employees and use their combined wisdom, skills, and experiences, establishing innovation as a true company mission.

Innovation management software facilitates collaborative projects on a large scale, ensuring every voice is being heard and considered. The opportunity to play an active role in projects sparks employees' entrepreneurial spirit, significantly increasing their motivation to participate.

More engagement can be the driver for a new culture that enables and encourages all employees to join and do their best. A culture supported and promoted by software, since it can present the rather complex topic of creating innovation intuitively and understandably while still being easy to use.

3. Integrate Valuable Partners into the Ecosystem

Employees aren’t the only relevant stakeholder group for innovation. Valuable partners can be found in every step along the value chain of companies, such as customers, suppliers, startups, or research institutes. They all offer helpful insights, ideas, or even technologies for innovation initiatives.

With innovation management software, integrating these stakeholders is just a few clicks away. Various interfaces enable organizations to connect them quickly to existing projects or initiatives. Digital structures allow uncomplicated and goal-oriented collaboration while giving the company full control over the process.

Encouraging these connections across company boundaries is the perfect way to internalize competencies which would have taken a lot of time and resources to build internally. The sum of these connections forms an innovation ecosystem containing all stakeholders and all data, information, and other sources of knowledge and creativity.

4. Boost ideation and implementation

One of the biggest advantages of innovation management software is the massive boost to innovation projects’ ideation and implementation stages. With all stakeholders and assets being directly connected and available, the rate of learning and adapting rises to previously unimagined heights.

Ideas are being discussed and optimized within quick, iterative loops and nourished by the thoughts of potentially endless numbers of stakeholders. Feedback is directly aimed at the responsible department or person in development. And new skills, technologies, or know-how are immediately absorbed and made accessible to the whole company.

These examples show that innovation management software brings a whole new level of speed to an organization, particularly in searching, identifying, and connecting urgently required solutions. This speed later translates into hard facts like a faster time to market and decreasing production costs.

5. Increase Resilience and Foresight

A well-placed and operated innovation management software also delivers great results in making an organization more resilient against external influences like crises or technological disruptions. On the one hand, it helps companies identify relevant transformations in their market early on, and on the other hand, it enables quick adaption to these changes.

Digital structures are better suited to support an agile framework needed here and can be customized more easily than their physical counterparts. Furthermore, digital systems are more connectable for handling and analyzing large amounts of data—the currency of the digital world.

Big data helps tremendously make the right decisions as it contains all the information from the numerous touchpoints inside and outside the organization. Modeling forecasts with this data support and insights from all stakeholders connected through the software is a great method for aligning company strategies with current market needs.

How to Digitalize Innovation in Your Organization

Innovation management software is the best companion for pushing innovation in uncertain times. Nobody can be certain which products, services, or business models will be successful in 10 years, which technologies will be developed, or which strategic partnerships with competitors might arise, but having the right foundation for all of this already in place is of great value.

Discover the role digital tools can play in your organization by exploring our range of innosabi innovation management software—or contact our Subject Matter Experts for dedicated support.