Collaborative innovation in companies is an approach that allows good practices and innovative projects proposed by the field to be created and disseminated. To set up a collaborative innovation system, you will need to structure your approach, but also the right tools to help you. What are the right tools for implementing collaborative innovation in companies? Answer in this article.
Tools for implementing collaborative innovation in companies
Tools for collecting ideas
collaborative innovation is first and foremost an approach that allows you to be open to the ideas of your employees or other stakeholders. It is therefore essential to set up a tool to collect these ideas. Formerly known as " idea boxes", these tools are now digital spaces accessible to all, from a mobile, a tablet or a computer.
These are often referred to as ideation platforms, or ideation platformscollaborative innovation.
What can you expect from idea-gathering tools in acollaborative innovation scheme?
- Allow your employees or stakeholders to propose ideas, alone or in teams
- Organise thematic innovation challenges to stimulate ideation from time to time
- Moderate the ideas proposed
- Allow everyone to consult, vote and even add to the ideas proposed
Tools for facilitating innovation communities
collaborative innovation is not just about proposing ideas. Your device must be animated, and this on several levels.
You must first animate your community of employees or stakeholders to encourage them to think collectively about the needs they feel and the irritants they encounter. In fact,collaborative innovation often finds a real impetus in the irritants encountered on the ground. For it is from the problems that we want to solve that we find the projects that make the most sense.
Once the first ideas have been proposed, community facilitation helps to maintain the dynamism ofcollaborative innovation. Indeed, as a facilitator, your role is to ask questions, react, start conversations again, and help the idea holders to communicate about the development of their projects.
What can you expect from community animation tools in acollaborative innovation scheme?
- Encourage your employees to think about their irritants and come up with new ideas
- Maintaining the buzz around thecollaborative innovation
Visual management tools
Yourcollaborative innovation process cannot do without moments of collective reflection. These moments often take the form of workshops such as design thinking. These workshops can be held at the beginning of the process, to generate ideas. They can also be organised once the ideas have been proposed, when it is time to think about how to put them into practice.
In addition, the democratisation of teleworking has made it necessary to use new digital tools to run remote workshops. Thus, to replace paperboards and walls of physical post-its, visual management tools are used. First of all, these tools allow you to create brainstorms. Each person proposes all the ideas that come to mind. Then it is possible to classify or organise all the ideas submitted, between the most relevant, the most popular, etc. This is how visual management tools encourage the circulation and emergence of ideas within your organisation.
What can you expect from visual management tools in acollaborative innovation system?
- Facilitating remote workshops to generate new ideas, or to reflect on the development of these ideas
Project management tools
Among the tools for implementingcollaborative innovation, project management tools will be useful to ensure that ideas are not left at the stage of... mere ideas. Indeed, it is quite possible that you will have to organise teams to experiment and develop projects. Project management tools will accompany this stage. They will materialise the major steps to come, and the processes to follow in the emergence of new projects. Sometimes, realintrapreneurship projects are even set up.
What can you expect from project management tools in acollaborative innovation scheme?
- Organising thepost-proposal phase
- Making the scheme concrete and meaningful
A single tool, or several tools for yourcollaborative innovation device?
There is no easy answer to this question. By using several tools, you retain a certain amount of flexibility on each part of yourcollaborative innovation approach. However, the risk is to lose your users in the multiplicity of interfaces, even though the multiplication of tools in companies is often pointed out as being a real irritant.
Conversely, having a single tool dedicated tocollaborative innovation has some advantages. To begin with, it allows you to controlcollaborative innovation from a single space. Your tool should therefore offer a wide functional coverage, in order to meet all your needs. You will then be able to obtain global engagement statistics and thus manage all aspects of the process: from the idea proposal to their promotion and implementation.
Beeshake allows you to manage yourcollaborative innovation system from a single modular and scalable space. You acculturate your users thanks to MOOCs, and encourage them to propose good practices and innovation projects. You also offer them content, and you animate and enhance them thanks to gamification, a real booster of individual and collective commitment. Finally, you use interactivity and live video features, and integrate your internal project management tools to offer a simple and perfectly integrated experience to all your users.
