10 Features That Unlock Engagement and Collaboration in Innovation

Innovation often requires a multi-disciplinary approach, as many challenges are too complex to be tackled by a single individual or team. By collaborating with others, team members leverage each other's strengths and collectively develop more effective solutions. Collaboration also enables team members to build off each other's ideas, leading to more creative and impactful solutions.

Engagement and collaboration also foster a sense of ownership and commitment to the innovation process. When team members feel that their input is valued and they have a stake in the process, they are more likely to be invested in the outcome and motivated to contribute to the project's success.

While engagement and collaboration are essential for driving innovation, several common pain points can hinder the effectiveness of these practices. Here are a few examples:

1. Communication breakdowns: Poor communication is a common problem in collaboration, resulting in misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and a lack of alignment.
2. Limited resources: In some cases, teams may need more resources to collaborate effectively, such as tools, technology, or time. This can result in lower productivity, missed deadlines, and incomplete or suboptimal solutions.
3. Resistance to change: Resistance to change is a common barrier to innovation. Getting people to embrace new ideas or approaches can be challenging, especially if they are used to a particular way of doing things.

Addressing these pain points is essential to build a culture of innovation and streamlining innovation activities. Effective engagement and collaboration require the right tools that make communication easy and transparent. Below we share ten innovation management software features that enable engagement and collaboration.

What to consider when cultivating engagement and collaboration that drives innovation strategies

1. Cross-functional teams: Create cross-functional teams that include diverse individuals from different departments, backgrounds, and areas of expertise. This will promote collaboration and bring various perspectives into the innovation process.
2. Effective communication: Establish clear communication channels and make use of tools that streamline communication,
3. Adequate resources: Ensure that team members have the resources they need to do their job effectively, including time, technology, and tools. Provide support and training as needed to promote skill development and confidence.
4. Recognition and incentives: Recognize and reward team members for their contributions to the innovation process. This can foster a positive and motivated team culture and promote engagement and collaboration.
5. Collaborative tools and technology: Utilize collaborative tools and technology to facilitate communication, idea sharing, and project management.

10 innovation software features that enable engagement and collaboration

Innovation management software can be a crucial tool for promoting engagement and collaboration in innovation. These ten features in the ITONICS Innovation OS provide a platform for global teams to share and develop new ideas, collaborate on projects, and manage innovation processes more effectively.

1. Create, categorize, and share innovation knowledge

Innovation management software needs to be able to capture, organize and systematize content and ideas. Depending on your use case, you need to collect and categorize diverse types of content differently to work with it.

The ITONICS Innovation Management Software provides best-practice templates for several different types of content and ideas, including trends, technologies, competitors, companies, risks, opportunities, ideation campaigns, ideas, and projects. This setup serves as the basic building blocks of the system that allows users to further work with their content, organize and structure it so that it can be used across teams, and create a platform for engagement and collaboration.

2. Comment, communicate, collaborate

Commenting within the software allows global team members, stakeholders, and subject matter experts to discuss, collaborate and share feedback to refine each other's ideas. It enables team members to ask questions, provide constructive criticism, and suggest improvements, which can lead to better outcomes. Experts can share their insights on a particular idea, which can help teams to understand the potential challenges and opportunities associated with the idea.

Use the ‘Advanced Commenting’ functionality in ITONICS to react to someone else's comments, add attachments or media, and mention certain users or pieces of content. For example, on a project, mention a particular technology related to the project to draw attention to it and create awareness and transparency.

Commenting is an excellent way to ensure transparency and clarity in communication. When team members comment on an idea, everyone can access the feedback and see the progress made.

3. Like, follow, and share content

Stay up to date with developments and discussions on the content you may be particularly interested in by using the like, follow and share functionalities. For example, as a program manager, you may want to stay updated on particular startups and technologies, as developments may influence current and planned projects. Or you may want to share important developments and changes within a project with colleagues in another department to find synergies and prevent overlaps.

4. Make innovation part of your everyday work

Get notified via email when anything changes on the project, technology, trend, etc., you are following. Notifications can save users time by letting them know when something needs their attention and can help increase user engagement within an innovation management platform.

5. Share specific views

When you want to get input from your colleagues and collaborate in innovation management software, you need to be able to look at the same information and insights across the system. Users in ITONICS can save specific views that they have already configured to their specific needs so that they can get back to it quickly at any time and share it with colleagues to have a shared view. Shared views facilitate communication between team members, allowing them to discuss and evaluate ideas, provide feedback, and share progress updates. By accessing the same information, team members can work together more effectively and avoid miscommunications.

Providing a common and transparent understanding of developments, progress, and the innovation process support decision-making and helps ensure that decisions are based on accurate and timely information.

6. Motivate and engage with gamification

Gamification can increase user engagement by making the innovation management process more fun, enjoyable, and interactive. By incorporating game elements such as challenges, points, and rewards, innovation management software can make the innovation process more engaging and motivating for users. ITONICS enables users to earn points and badges for specific types of engagement, and the leaderboard displays the activity points users have acquired.  

7. Harness the power of the crowd with collaborative ideation

Bring together diverse people with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to generate more creative and innovative solutions. When people from different areas of expertise and with different skills come together to solve a problem, they can approach it from multiple angles and find new solutions that may not have been possible otherwise.

ITONICS Campaigns enable the collection, categorization, evaluation, management, and development of collaborative ideation on one digital platform. Make team collaboration possible and identify which ideas to act on by pushing ideas through phase-gate workflows to arrive at which ideas to prioritize.  

8. Evaluate collaboratively

Collaborative ratings allow users to assess intelligence in your system. For example, in ITONICS, users can rate trends, technologies, startups, risks, opportunities, ideas, and more in the system. This collective evaluation helps you make better decisions based on assessments from your innovation communities. You are also able to visualize information based on the ratings in ITONICS. In ITONICS, ratings consist of multiple rating criteria (for example, Business Potential) from which each has multiple rating steps (for instance Low-High). The rating is either a community rating, or it can be given by single experts.

Ratings provide a way for users to engage with the innovation management software and feel like they have a voice in the innovation process. This can lead to greater participation and better-quality solutions.

Click on any of the technologies on the radar below and see what ratings look like in the card that opens up on the right.

9. Simplify sharing specific insight

Innovation management requires innovation managers and teams to share and report on insights, processes, and progress. To improve transparency and collaboration across your organization, share intelligence with global teams and stakeholders using the ITONICS Embed feature. Embed enables specific visualizations from the ITONICS Innovation OS to be displayed on your own website or intranet. Colleagues can discover insights, and it allows external networks to explore findings and view project progress.

Below you can try out the Embed feature. Click on any of the technologies, dots on the concentric circles, or any segment on the outline of the radar circle.

10. Present to stakeholders

Visualizing and reporting relevant data to stakeholders plays a vital role in getting participation and convincing management to invest in innovation efforts. Present visualizations such as the Radar, Matrix, Boards, or Roadmap in the  ITONICS system to make what you present available to all stakeholders. Alternatively, use the export functions in ITONICS to present your intelligence as PDFs or PNGs that can be included in presentations or attached to emails.

ITONICS also enables users to send emails straight from the system. This drives engagement and collaboration and can be customized to suit your specific needs.

Boost your innovation success with ITONICS

Innovation management software centralizes innovation intelligence and activities. A single point of truth streamlines processes and makes it easier for teams to collaborate and share ideas. The ITONICS Innovation OS enables end-to-end innovation on one digital platform and facilitates open communication by providing a space for employees to share ideas, provide feedback, and collaborate on projects. This can help to break down silos and encourage cross-functional collaboration, leading to more innovative solutions.

Want to learn more about the features and functionalities of the ITONICS Innovation OS? Get started with a free software demo.

Have more time?

• Read 3 Ways to Communicate Key Findings from Innovation Activities
• Attend events to meet and learn from other innovation rockstars
• Listen to the podcast episode “Global Innovation - Together” by KPMG