Change is an exciting necessity in modern life. It drives us forward, creating new opportunities. But when every company does the same thing, we begin to stagnate. 

If you ask us, stagnation sounds pretty boring.

Innovation is a driving force behind business success, so you must take steps to overcome innovation inertia and other challenges faced by would-be innovation disruptors. 

Whether you’re a Chief Innovation Officer or an Innovation Manager, you’ll be well-versed in the struggles associated with time constraints, capability chasms and process problems — all things which stop innovation in its tracks. And these challenges are magnified as your business grows, and there are more aspects to your engine you need to connect.

That’s where innovation tools come in. Intelligent tools help support your innovation programmes by helping you identify opportunities, broaden your horizons, find new inputs, connect with your customers, people, and investors, and validate your ideas. 

The importance of corporate innovation tools

The tools you use can make or break your business. But that doesn’t mean you should just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. 

Using the right tools can supercharge our productivity, profit, and customer satisfaction (need we go on?) The right tools.

A massive 43% of workers feel they spend too much time switching between different online tools and applications. So, we should carefully select tools and applications for specific functions.

When it comes to corporate innovation, intelligent tools help us work more efficiently, make smarter decisions, and collaborate more effectively. It really is a no-brainer. Let’s get into the best corporate innovation tools.

The best corporate innovation tools to support your engine

1. ZenDesk for Customer Support

Your innovation strategy should always centre around your customers' needs. There’s no point in building a product or service if no one is going to use it. This is one reason for the rise of reverse innovation.

ZenDesk facilitates customer support, including ticketing and communication via social channels. Essentially, it removes all roadblocks that would prevent customers from sharing their feedback with you — and from you hearing it and feeding their inputs into your innovation strategy.

2. Canny for Idea Management

This decade, we’re saying goodbye to siloed working. It’s important to acknowledge that the work of one team will always impact another, and the same goes for innovation.

Canny allows you to centralise all initiatives, from innovation in IT to systems innovation. This tool supports transparency, collaboration and project management by providing easy-to-understand analytics and a streamlined idea submission process.

3. Plan View for Innovation Management

A fundamental aspect of your innovation framework is idea management. Innovation feeds into all aspects of business operations. This means that to support the running of your engine, you need a tool that will support issue resolution and optimise your chances of innovation success.

Plan View helps you identify great ideas and take them all the way to market, offering portfolio management, agile planning and PSA.

4. Future Foundry for Testing Validation

Future Foundry can help you test your idea's customer desirability, technical feasibility and commercial viability in as few as twelve weeks and get it to market in as few as six months.

Let’s just chat about testing and validation for now. Validating your proof of concept can be daunting. But with access to the right customers, you can get the robust data and real-world evidence you need to create a great business case for higher-ups, justifying the approval of funding and staffing for your ideas.

Future Foundry uses a range of methodologies and tools to support validation, including the  Value Proposition Canvas template to kill assumptions, search trend analysis to measure desirability, expert interviews to test feasibility, and split tests to assess viability.

Goodbye guesswork, hello disruptive innovation

If you want to increase your efficiency and supercharge your innovation potential, check out our Corporate Innovation Toolkit. Our toolkit is packed to the brim with experiments designed to support innovation and help you discover and validate your solutions.