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Table of Contents

• What is Idea Management Software?
• The benefits of Idea Management Software
• Typical features of Idea Management Software
• The cost of Idea Management Software
• Considerations when purchasing Idea Management Software
• Relevant Idea Management Software trends

What is Idea Management Software?

Idea Management Software helps businesses in creating a systematic process for developing, sharing, brainstorming, and implementing ideas into practical and innovative real-world scenarios. These solutions give users a common platform where they can submit new ideas related to business operations, projects, and processes, while others can weigh in with their input and feedback.

The benefits of Idea Management Software

• Brings improvement: Almost all ideas are pitched to improve something, whether it’s ideas on how to cut costs, streamline a process, upgrading machines, improving safety, or enhancing the customer experience. The ability to capture, manage, and act upon ideas in an organized manner will benefit any organization by improving existing processes.
• Does not let ideas get skipped: Any suggestion, good or bad, is worth consideration. Simply discussing it around the table and then dropping the idea can lead to loss of potential solutions. Idea management software prevents this by laying out a systematic approach of gathering, discussing, and implementing ideas. It makes sure that no suggestion gets skipped or missed due to human negligence.
• Improves collaboration: Idea management software is not just for someone to share his or her idea. It gives equal opportunity to other employees to comment and enhance other’s ideas. This enables all employees to cooperate and collaborate on ideas to shape them into more innovative opportunities.

Typical features of Idea Management Software

• Idea ranking: Rank ideas based on the number of votes received and highlight the most favored.
• Ideation: Create, develop, share, and store potentially innovative new ideas.
• Collaboration: Work collaboratively to discuss ideas, share information, and communicate progress within the team.
• Mind mapping: Organize information in a hierarchical way to establish and display the relationship between ideas.
• Approval workflow: Route documents and other data through one or more stakeholders for review and approval.
• Search: Search for ideas from a centralized idea repository using a text-based query.

The cost of Idea Management Software

Most products in the market are priced on a “per user, per month” basis and can be divided into three pricing tiers based on their starting price.

Price ranges*:

• $0 - $3
• $3 - $9
• $9+

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offering that was found on vendor websites on December 5, 2019. These ranges correspond to 25th, 75th, and 100th percentile of the pricing information gathered from the vendor websites of sample products.

The above list summarizes pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise or premium product, which is priced higher, may include some additional features such as public-private groups, unlimited boards, and priority support.

Considerations when purchasing Idea Management Software

• Decentralized versus centralized solutions: Before buying an idea management software, make sure you evaluate your stakeholders. Are they going to be the top executives and people from senior management or your entire workforce from across all levels of the organization? If you fall under the first category with limited participants in the ideation process, you can look for solutions that charge on a per user, per month basis. But if you fall under the second category and would like your entire organization to be a part of the ideation process, go with solutions that charge a bulk monthly cost for at least 100 users.
• Read online reviews: Choosing the perfect idea management solution for your business is not easy, especially when there are thousands of existing products in the market. Going through reviews from existing users on websites like Zoftware can be a good resource to understand the user experience of a few products before making any purchasing commitments.

Relevant Idea Management Software trends

• Rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI): So far, idea management has relied heavily on the person submitting the idea and the panel evaluating it. They are mostly evaluated on how well it is explained to the panel and the tentative benefits the idea can provide post-implementation. Most of the steps involved in an ideation process still require heavy manual work. However, with the continual advancement of technology in the space of AI and machine learning, there is a huge opportunity in the idea management process. AI-enabled software can better analyze the details of an idea and evaluate its credibility based on the success rate of similar ideas implemented in the past. They can better evaluate the implementation journey to highlight any shortcomings and proactively suggest ideators to address those issues.
• Cloud-based software will continue to be top priority: Cloud-based software or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is and will continue to be the first priority of businesses when buying a new idea management software. Benefits like affordability, accessibility, and integrability that come with cloud-based deployment options make them a great choice for many businesses.