Collaborative innovation software brings purpose, focus, and structure to collaboration to help you turn ideas into commercial value.

Collaboration tools are necessary to the proper functioning of any business, especially for organizations with a large workforce spread across many different locations around the globe. Understanding the importance of collaboration really is a no-brainer: people and business units alike need to share information and work together. Whether it’s Google Workspace, Slack, Microsoft Teams or SharePoint, to name a few, we all use one tool or another to communicate with team members. But as good as these tools are for conversations, follow-ups, and meetings, they nonetheless lack the capacity to bring ideas to market through collaborative concept development. What does that mean exactly? 

Well, collaboration is an essential part of the idea management lifecycle, but whereas organizations have collaborative software, they often lack collaborative innovation software, which brings purpose, focus, and structure to collaboration for your organization to repeatedly discover, develop, and transform ideas into commercial value. This lifecycle is what Forrester describes as the 5 key activities of innovation management, a process through which creative ideas are given life via targeting, ideation, incubation, business planning, and commercialization (more on this in point 1 below). According to one Forrester analyst, innovation is a matter of survival for many of their clients, so let’s dive into what collaborative innovation software is and the 5 things you need to know about it.

1. It’s mission-specific

Collaborative innovation software allows your employees to discover and collaborate on ideas that have potential value, develop them, prototype them, fine-tune them, and ultimately launch them into the commercial arena where you can expect to become a rockstar. Okay, maybe not a rockstar, but you get the idea (pun intended). The point is, collaborative innovation software doesn’t just facilitate collaboration — its purpose is to bring data and people together so that untapped opportunities that align with business strategy can be commercialized. It’s an innovation management process that involves 5 key activities:

  1. Targeting: Scout emerging trends and technologies, and monitor market dynamics and consumer behaviors to better understand which bets you want to place on innovation.

  2. Ideation: The most familiar activity, this is where you let your employees’ creativity run free by launching campaigns around specific challenges to find ideas that can potentially solve a particular business or customer problem.

  3. Incubation: This is where you bring out the mad scientist in people and experiment with an idea to determine if it has legs. Get ready to move fast and fail fast!

  4. Business planning: This is where you create a business case and assess whether you have the budget and the resources to commercialize the idea. Your organization can work with partners or invest in startups to make this a reality.

  5. Commercialization: This is the execution phase, where an idea is no longer just an idea, but an actual solution that your organization is spending resources on to deliver value. 

This collaborative process also helps to engage employees in a creative capacity to think about new and novel ways to improve processes, products, and services. Speaking of engagement, let’s talk about gamification.

2. It could be turned into a game

Playing? At work? And getting paid to do it? That’s the stuff of dreams, you might think, but not anymore. Your employees can actually be rewarded and recognized for their creative contributions to the betterment of your organization. Believe it or not, some companies out there are making collaboration into a social innovation game!

Take Barton Malow for example, a leading employee-owned construction management company. They set up a program called “The Innovation Game” which essentially “gamified” problem-solving using a points-based system linked to recognition, monetary rewards, and a portion of annual bonuses. Previously, engagement levels in non-mission-critical undertakings were low, but through this incentive-based program, Barton Malow sourced more than 29,000 ideas, some of which have led to notable improvements and actionable solutions in the field where construction takes place.

Think of it as social media, if you will, but for ideation, supported by a workflow-driven system for idea development. Let’s say your organization posts a company-wide challenge. Now, your workforce can interact with this challenge in a number of ways, namely by submitting, commenting on, voting for, and liking ideas. Barton Malow, for instance, even incentivized employees to perform certain activities like attending webinars, volunteering at events, and filling out surveys, among others. Unlike social media however, business rules are set up to reward behaviors that are purpose-driven and provide value.

The possibilities truly are endless, but the end goal is to engage. And the benefits? Well, you get employees vested in your organization’s future, you eliminate silos and create inclusive work environments, and finally, you form value creation relationships between different employees with diverse perspectives to make innovation truly sustainable. Talk about a win-win. Speaking of bringing people together, let’s talk about crowdsourcing.

3. It breaks the traditional boundaries of collaboration

Crowdsourcing is, well, sourcing ideas from a crowd. Case in point: Novartis, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, brought together 20,000 R&D associates to come up with and work on “crazy, transformative ideas” for reimagining medicine and accelerating scientific innovation (as if the process itself wasn’t crazy enough, but this is to be expected from science folk!).

But here’s the deal: crowdsourcing doesn’t have to be limited to internal collaboration. Collaborative innovation software also empowers organizations to think way beyond the organization. Sometimes, when you’re too close to your own offerings, you might have a bit of difficulty spotting new opportunities for growth. The answer? Open innovation! Get fresh perspectives from your broader community of customers, partners, expert solvers, startups, academia, and even government to stay on top of emerging trends, latest technologies, and competitive threats.

Bridging the gap between internal and external resources is a big upper hand that allows your organization to build trusted, strategic relationships that deliver long-term value — and this can be done in an ongoing manner or through one-off initiatives. Talk about a perfect segue for the next point actually.

4. It’s ongoing but could also be a one-off initiative

Collaborative innovation software is key to unlocking repeatable business value in a sustainable manner. That’s its strongest point: it empowers creative, consistent, and cost-effective experimentation. It’s like your own personal innovation lab for mad scientists. But sometimes, organizations might be looking for a very specific solution in the shortest possible time frame, in which case they can choose to host an assortment of engaging departmental or company-wide events, each one with its own distinct use case. Let’s take a brief look at a few of these open innovation activities:

  • Challenge: Tap into a selected crowd of participants to find solutions for a carefully described problem or opportunity using a thoroughly planned and executed campaign.

  • Shark Tanks: Extend a unique opportunity to your employees by having them share their creativity, insight, competitive spirit, and business decision-making skills to solve high value business challenges and develop investment-ready ideas in a collaborative team setting.

  • Innovation Jams: Drive culture change and obtain feedback on various topics around corporate strategy with an open, transparent, and mass-scale outreach effort. This enterprise-wide event typically lasts 1-7 days with results available in 48 hours.

  • Hackathons: Bring together people with ideas across your enterprise, individually or in small teams, in a unique environment to encourage creative thinking and spark innovative concepts, ideas, and prototypes around a specific topic or challenge. Hackathons typically last 24 to 48 hours and result in finished prototypes for new products, services, or business models.

It’s worth noting that these activities can also include your broader community of customers, partners, and stakeholders. What’s more, collaborative innovation software also allows you to drive engagement further by integrating with your employees’ favorite tools. Yet another perfect segue for the next point.

5. It makes innovation more accessible and visible

Let your employees innovate no matter where they are and no matter what tool they’re using. How about that? By combining innovation with collaborative software, your team can effortlessly contribute and collaborate on their ideas without ever leaving their applications of choice. Here are a few use cases that illustrate the wonders of supporting innovation workflows across different business systems:

  • Ludwig is having a group discussion in Microsoft Teams about the new challenge his company recently launched. Amid the conversation, Ludwig gets a brilliant idea, and simply submits it through Teams. No muss, no fuss. His focus is squarely on the idea, not on getting it out there, resulting in more opportunities for creativity.

  • Let’s say Sonia submits her grandiose idea through Slack, business rules can be set up to push notifications to all team members that a challenge has received a new idea submission, providing greater visibility into the innovation campaign and motivating others to participate.

  • Rudolf wants to submit an idea of his own, but can’t find inspiration. Not a problem. By connecting his innovation management platform to private and public data sources, he can receive a stream of curated content and data as a source of inspiration to transform weak signals into insights that he can then use to develop and submit his winning idea.

By seamlessly integrating innovation with everyday work, the gaps between business goals and innovation outcomes dramatically reconvene to maximize cross-functional collaboration and fundamentally transform the organization’s culture of innovation. This makes innovation easier to scale as everyone is more aware of and involved in cocreation, which fosters a greater sense of transparency, trust, and inclusivity.

In its latest report on innovation management platforms, Forrester states that “continuous innovation to stay ahead is a modern business imperative for customer-obsessed firms.” There’s a whole other world to collaboration that organizations can greatly benefit from to make themselves more clearly understood in the marketplace, and it begins with digitally transforming the work environment so that employees can fearlesslesly contribute, collaborate on, and commercialize their ideas. 

Harnessing creative problem solving is the new model for sustainable growth, and embracing this strategy is a step towards a collective future-fit mindset that motivates everyone to go that extra mile and feel more connected to the business and its customers. This results in a more adaptive, creative, and resilient organization, which Forrester’s Q3 2020 Future-Fit Technology Survey found is the kind that delivers revenue growth at 2.7 times the industry average. So, once you’ve adopted the collaborative innovation software that’s right for your organization, the next question to ask is… how do you build an innovation portfolio that’s future-fit?