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Every year, IdeaScale analyzes our system and customer data and releases a report on crowdsourced innovation trends and benchmarks. You can find this year’s report here, but one of the questions that we pay a lot of attention to is why people are looking to purchase an innovation management platform in the first place.

Here are the top four reasons that IdeaScale customers opt to buy an innovation management platform.

To assist in creating a culture of innovation, you need to increase transparency. Surprising as it may seem, a big part of innovation culture is communication around innovation. If everyone at an organization can see new ideas coming in, experiments being conducted and results charted, people have more reason to participate in an innovation culture. Additionally, a wealth of research exists to support the theory that the best ideas are actually collisions between different ideas and for ideas to collide, you need to be able to see other ideas.

There simply isn’t a place for idea data to be mined, organized, and protected. Ideas need a place. Think about it: you have a place for your lead data, a place for your financial data, a place for your customer data, a place for your documents, a place to track projects…but where do you put your idea data? If you don’t have a place it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to collaborate and take action on new and existing ideas. If you can store your idea data, then you can search it at any time, you can share it with others, and you can take action on it. Ideas don’t need to depend on the luck of being captured and shared at the exact right time – they can always be there for you.

To increase efficiency by reducing redundancy and increasing alignment. One of my favorite stories at IdeaScale is the story of the microgravity capillary graduated cylinder, which is used by NASA to measure the volume of liquid in a zero-gravity environment. One of the teams needed to find a solution for their project on the International Space Station, and when they asked if anyone else at NASA had a suggestion, they found a solution that saved them four years of research and over a million dollars – but the best part is the fact that the solution of the microgravity capillary graduated cylinder came from someone who worked only 300 yards away from the person looking for a solution. If you aren’t sharing ideas, looking for similar ones, and repurposing success, you could be wasting millions of dollars even when your collaborators are close at hand. People need searchable, scalable insight into what others are working on.

Finally, to find new creative quality ideas. If you’re going to be able to stay relevant, prevent disruption, adapt to emerging trends, and better serve your customers and employees, then you are going to need new ideas. The more, the better. The more diverse, the better. Adopting an innovation management system allows innovation leaders to gather ideas that they never would have thought of without a broad group of collaborators.

Want to learn more?

To gain an understanding of the capabilities of an innovation management software offering, join our July 14th webinar, which includes a software demonstration and the opportunity to participate in a live Q&A.

About the Author

Rob Hoehn is the co-founder and CEO of IdeaScale: the largest open innovation software platform in the world. Hoehn launched crowdsourcing software as part of the open government initiative and IdeaScale’s robust portfolio now includes many other industry notables, such as EA Sports, NBC, NASA, Xerox and many others. Prior to IdeaScale, Hoehn was Vice President of Client Services at Survey Analytics.

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