Innovation management tools are a must-have for every company.

Why?

Well, imagine your employees turning their ideas into inventions and intellectual property for your company.

They can generate and submit ideas from anytime, anywhere. Develop these ideas into inventions through collaboration and proper evaluation from your expert evaluators.

Finally, they can disclose their inventions to take the key step toward their patent journey.

Innovation management software is designed to help organizations streamline their innovation processes and make an inventor’s journey effortless.

Since the innovation journey does not end with disclosing inventions and enters a whole different ball game, the scope of innovation tools widens further.

These tools typically provide a range of features and functionalities to support streamlined innovation management, including idea generation, collaboration, evaluation, and implementation.

But for businesses to capture patentable ideas, let’s review in detail how innovation management tools fit in.

Innovation management tools feature

#1 Idea Capture

A study by Harvard Business Review found that companies using idea-innovation management software saw a 50% increase in the number of ideas submitted by employees.

Employee creativity is taking a new shape since AI has come into play. With InspireIP’s Inventor assistant, anyone from your organization can brainstorm and generate ideas or refine their existing ideas.

Innovation management tools also enable you to run innovation challenges. These challenges are a great way of aligning your business strategy with your innovation strategy. Innovation or Idea challenges act like virtual hackathons allowing your employees to submit their inventions with ease, aligned to a specific goal, and beneficial for the company’s growth.

Moreover, you can run innovation challenges using an innovation management system unlimited times in a year. You can pick your business goals one by one, and start collecting targeted solutions as per your priority.

They require less time and effort to launch and manage and can be run for any desired period of time. Employees can add ideas under these challenges individually or collaboratively. Once ideas are captured, they are sent to the evaluation phase.

#2 Collaboration

Everyone knows that collaboration is key to any successful innovation process.

But when it comes to communicating and interacting productively, it rarely happens.

Innovation management software provides a centralized platform for employees to collaborate on ideas, share insights, and build upon each other’s thoughts.

Imagine a proactive to and fro between two colleagues from the marketing and product department.

One knows the customer’s needs firsthand and understands their pain points, the other knows how to improve the product. Timely communication and brainstorming sessions can do wonders for your product portfolio and eventually the end customers.

By facilitating collaboration, these tools ensure that all relevant stakeholders are involved in the innovation process. This leads to more comprehensive and well-thought-out inventions.

They also help break down silos within organizations, encouraging cross-departmental collaboration and ensuring that ideas from all parts of the company are considered

Our case study on GreyB’s innovation program found that 24% of inventions were filed by 2 or more co-inventors, highlighting the importance of collaboration.

#3 Evaluation

One of the biggest challenges companies face in innovation management is evaluating the potential of ideas.

Innovation management tools help address this challenge by providing a structured framework for evaluating ideas based on predefined criteria. These tools allow companies to assign apt evaluators to review and evaluate a different range of ideas, ensuring that each idea is given fair consideration.

The inventors can submit their invention disclosures in the system, perform a prior art search, and send them to the IP team for review.

After review, the IP team forwards the invention to the patent attorneys for the drafting of the application.

With the help of analytics and reporting features, you can track the progress of the submitted ideas through the evaluation process and identify any bottlenecks or areas for improvement.

Related read- Why innovation management software?

#4 Implementation

Implementing ideas is where the rubber meets the road in innovation management.

Innovation management tools help companies streamline the implementation process through collaboration and easy innovation tracking.

For ideas that need immediate execution are recognized and sent for implementation after only one or max of two reviews. Ideas that have a patentability potential are sent to the IP team for review then the drafting attorney or external attorney before finalizing it and filing it with the patent office.

With innovation management tools it becomes easy to track progress toward implementation goals with complete visibility of implementation efforts. This allows you to quickly identify and address any issues that may arise.

In conclusion, innovation management software plays a crucial role in helping companies manage the entire innovation process, from idea generation to implementation.

They take innovation management to the next level by providing a platform for collaboration, evaluation, and implementation. These tools ensure that your company turns ideas into valuable innovations that drive growth and success by developing ideas into inventions, disclosing them, and collaborating with external and internal IP teams.

Want to see how IP Assist can work for you? Book a free demo here.

Related read: 10 reasons why every business needs innovation management software.