Best Idea Management Software for Small Businesses

Explosive growth and profits in the last few years has accompanied innovative technology and services. Even if you haven’t started a new business in these areas, you’ve had to adapt to the demand in creativity and accessibility that comes hand in hand with innovation. The benefit in trend spotting and market forecasts is getting an edge on the market, strengthening brand value and attracting more customers who value bigger and better.

Spigit: Idea Management Software

If you’re a business rooted in dynamic changes or even just services that exceed expectations, you need to do what you can to harness creativity. The best way is with idea management software. Spigit understands that you start with the tools and people closest to you.
Spigit uses social networking to connect employees, customers and partners in an effort to “activate” your team to make the most out of social currency. This is done through a combination of rewards and social recognition for idea generation, as well as idea graduation, trading and game mechanics. They’ve also taken the momentum of innovation and have expanded their services to offer webinar series, and now include coverage across Facebook, SharePoint and Yammer.

Crowdcast: Social Business Intelligence

Crowdcast, a top competitor with Spigit, offers a similar service that focuses on social business intelligence. They also use a gaming system that rewards employees for smart insights into business trends, metrics and forecasts. Business executives reap the reward of a network of thinkers that offers continuous and authentic analysis. The goal is to then use that information to navigate business and leadership decisions, and at the same time steer away from risks.

Brightidea: From Proposal to Implementation

If you’re looking for more than just idea generation, something more along the lines of idea management and implementation, then look toward Brightidea. They offer a wealth of services but gravitate to three central points, including Webstorm, Switchboard and Pipeline. Webstorm creates one-click campaign setups that are then configured before they’re activated on an across-the-web network that essentially becomes brainstorming 2.0 – a digital brainstorm harnessing greater thinking power that yields more powerful results. Switchboard lets you manage the incoming ideas, plug them into proposals then manage those proposals. Once a proposal is accepted, you use Pipeline to create/manage projects and respective teams.
Brightidea also offers valuable innovation reports that keep you updated on the trend of idea management itself. The company offers all prospective customers a free trial to help them assess just how valuable it is to their respective businesses.

Imaginatik: Insight Generation

Along somewhat similar lines, Imaginatik offers the same in terms of creating a system that converts an idea from just a thought into calculable profits. Imaginatik sets up a four step path, that starts with discovery – a process of getting the right ideas with what Imaginatik calls “insight generation.” Using strategic-planning workshops and innovation-discovery software, paired with program management and consulting, Imaginatik helps clients filter, collect and prioritize ideas and then implement them.
Imaginatik’s software, Innovation Central, is a gem. It can run and manage multiple campaigns, monitor activity and track decisions. After 15 years of field testing, Innovation Central has proven to be user-friendly and successful in extracting and refining ideas, highlighting a company’s best innovators and even identifying personality types, which goes a long way in helping a company with its leadership executive management goals.

BrainBank: For Targeted Events

And then there’s BrainBank, which focuses on qualitative results that are methodologically tracked and analyzed with a team of experts that guide you through the process. Interestingly, BrainBank understands that not all companies can invest money and/or time into idea management – but they may still be interested in brushing up on it. With that in mind, BrainBank offers targeted events, including Ideaswarm and Ideablitz for companies that want to tap into innovation management without an extensive long-term campaign.