Use these 10 SaaS Tools for Innovation Management

Every once in a while, an idea might pop up in your or one of your team members’ heads that has the potential to radically transform your business and how it adds value. Collecting, sorting, and implementing these ideas in a streamlined way is imperative for successful innovation management. However, as an Innovation Manager, you do not have the time and luxury to sit with a pen and paper and ask your stakeholders to jot down their ideas. Luckily, emerging technology companies offer various SaaS tools for innovation management. These software tools make your job easier, more productive & efficient while delivering great results. But there are thousands of options to choose from. That’s why we carefully selected and shortlisted 10 innovation management Software-as-a-Service tools for you. Happy exploring!

Explore 10 SaaS Tools for Innovation Management

1. Planview Spigit Harnesses the Power of Collective Intelligence

Pricing – $55 000 per year

Location – Austin, Texas, USA

Use Cases – Idea Management, Project Portfolio Management

Type – Work Management Software

No idea is a silly idea. You never know which one will bring the best results for your company. Planview Spigit uncovers and manages these ground-breaking ideas and assists you in bringing them to market with minimal effort from the innovation team. The pre-configured or custom templates allow you to discover opportunities and solve problems by exploring specific innovation use cases. You can also rank ideas without bias through an algorithm that uses prior user assessments to determine pairings. Moreover, the automatic promotion of ideas from crowd selection to subject matter experts and scoring methods eliminate the need to review every idea.

2. Eureka Provides Access to Public Funding & International Collaboration

Pricing – not disclosed

Location – Brussels, Belgium

Use Cases – International Collaboration, Funding

Type – Public Network

Many great ideas do not turn into products, and thus, never get a chance to compete in the market solely due to a lack of resources. This is why Eureka builds a public network for international cooperation in Research & Development (R&D) and innovation, present in over 45 countries. This eases collaboration between organizations across borders, thereby offering you the freedom to design project proposals and build your ideal consortium.

3. Wazoku Develops an Open Innovation Marketplace

Pricing – not disclosed

Location – London, UK

Use Cases – Open Innovation, Idea Management

Type – Enterprise Solution

One innovation inspires another. To promote this, Wazoku offers an open innovation marketplace that combines the expertise of your internal crowd with external engineers, entrepreneurs, academics, scientists, and customers. This solves some of the most pressing business problems and opens new doors of possibilities. The platform comprises 500 000+ expert problem solvers from over 195 countries. Diverse groups of people with different perspectives and areas of expertise enable you to boost the innovation resources available to you.

4. StartUs Insights Empowers You with Data-Driven Startup & Technology Scouting

Pricing – Available when you book a free demo

Location – Vienna, Austria

Use Cases – Innovation Scouting, Startup Scouting, Technology Scouting, Trend Scouting, Trend Intelligence

Type – Startup Scouting Platform

To stay ahead of the technology curve, you must be aware of the emerging trends, technologies, and innovations in your market. StartUs Insights offers just that. Its Big Data & AI-powered technology and startup scouting platform – the Discovery Platform – allows you to avoid disruption and act on opportunities to meet your innovation targets. Covering over 2,5 million startups and scaleups globally, the platform is the world’s largest resource for information on emerging companies. This allows you to exhaustively scout emerging companies and, moreover, identify the most relevant ones by applying filters such as founding year, funding stage, geographical location, technology, industry, and many more.

5. Itonics Streamlines Innovation Portfolio Management

Pricing – starts from $292 per two weeks

Location – Nuremberg, Germany

Use Cases – Technology & Trend Management, Innovation Roadmapping

Type – Innovation Management Platform

The key to sustained competitive advantage is innovation, and this depends on an organization’s strategies. Itonics builds a balanced innovation portfolio to enable a systematic process of creating new innovations while maintaining current cash flow and reducing business decline. The innovation and strategy platform visualizes how different innovation initiatives are supporting the overall business strategies. You can also set up key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor the success of your portfolio or dive into granular level monitoring of individual projects.

6. IdeaScale Manages the Entire Innovation Lifecycle

Pricing – starts from $4 999 per feature (yearly)

Location – San Francisco, California, US

Use Cases – Idea Collection & Selection, Innovation Maturity Assessment, Planning & Prototyping

Type – End-to-End Innovation Management Software

Innovation starts with realizing the need for solving a problem. IdeaScale assists you in identifying what matters to your customers and how you can create more value for them through in-app surveys and smart tags. You can then collect ideas based on that with voting and commenting features. Besides, the software and your crowd will pinpoint the best ideas that make the most sense for your organization even when you are occupied. This paves the way for prototyping and testing the ideas as well as turning them into the solutions that will drive your business forward.

7. Canny Enables Effective Product Management

Pricing – starts from $50 per month (for 100 users)

Location – San Francisco, California, USA

Use Cases – Feature Request Management, Idea Management, Product Management

Type – Business-to-Business (B2B) Product Management Software

Product feedback is very important for working on existing features and innovating new ones. Canny organizes all feedback under a single platform, thus avoiding information scattered across multiple channels. You will be able to use this organized feedback to make informed product decisions. It enables you to better understand what your users want by storing use cases and providing additional clarity. You can also score and rank feature requests and tasks based on their impact as well as keep your stakeholders in the loop by publishing your entries to the changelog.

8. Planbox Maintains Continuous Improvement

Pricing – starts at $6 per month (for 1 user)

Location – Laval, Canada

Use Cases – Continuous Improvement, Open Innovation, Employee Engagement

Type – Innovation Management Software

Innovation does not happen out of the blue, it is a result of small improvements day by day. Hence, Planbox Continuous Improvement Platform discovers problems, enables cross-functional collaboration, analyzes ideas, and finds solutions for your business processes. It allows internal and external stakeholders to submit new suggestions, feedback, and ideas, which the management and other decision-makers can rate and review on an ongoing basis. This ensures that your organization is always striving for ways to achieve business excellence and innovate new products and services.

9. Ideanote Measures Innovation Performance

Pricing – starts from $12 per month (up to 10 users)

Location – Copenhagen, Denmark

Use Cases – Idea Management, Innovation Performance Measurement, Innovation Workflow Automation

Type – Business Growth Platform

After an idea is approved and goes into the execution stage, the next important thing is to keep a tab on how the production is turning out. To enable this, Ideanote tracks your performance from day one and makes reports that analyze if your efforts are bearing fruits. The software also lets you find and share your innovation success stories with your crowd, encouraging them to work even harder. Moreover, during the process, you just might discover hidden gems within your workforce and give them the credit and appreciation they deserve.

10. Sprintbase Simplifies the Change Management Process

Pricing – not disclosed

Location – London, UK

Use Cases – Design Thinking, Change Management, Remote Collaboration

Type – Remote Innovation Management Software

To thrive well in the tech-driven market and gain the upper hand over your competitors, it is essential for you to upgrade your business processes, if you have not already. But we understand it is not easy. Therefore, we suggest you take advantage of software tools that help you tackle change management, especially in this period of “new normal”. Sprintbase is one such solution that offers various software tools to let your teams collaborate remotely to innovate new products. But more importantly, it builds a customized package considering the specific requirements of your organization. It also trains your workforce so that they are abreast with how the tools function, enabling a smooth transition.

What are your favorite SaaS Tools for Innovation Management?

What is your approach to innovation management? Still working with traditional methods or are you already applying data-driven solutions? Get in touch & let us know!