What are Idea Management Systems? Definition, Features & Examples

I covered the definition of Idea Management in a previous post. In this post, I’d like to discuss the definition and typical features of Idea Management Systems.

Idea management systems are one of the most important tools in building your own systematic innovation management process. With the advent of cloud-based software, you have an excellent selection of idea management software available to you – whatever your needs and price points are.

Let us now look at this in more detail…

What Are Idea Management Systems?

“Idea Management System” refers to a turn-key system – often delivered as a cloud-based software to help you quickly and easily build a systematic innovation management process at your organization.

Idea management systems usually have features that enable you to:

  • Set up your own branded web portal for managing ideas
  • Define access rights to your idea management portal – Make it public, or Restrict access
  • Allow users to submit ideas
  • Group ideas into categories
  • Enable users to vote and comment on ideas
  • Allow users to collaborate to flesh out ideas
  • Identify the most popular ideas
  • Evaluate ideas using custom criteria
  • Select ideas for implementation
  • Keep users updated on the status of ideas
  • Reward users for their participation – Usually via virtual rewards

Examples of Idea Management Systems:

Two popular companies that use idea management systems are:

  1. Starbucks – My Starbucks Ideas
  2. Dell – Dell IdeaStorm

While both of these are targeted at consumers – you can build idea management systems that are targeted at B2B customers, your organization’s employees, your organization’s suppliers, and more. These can help you build a systematic innovation management process at your organization – and fire up your innovation.

In my next post, I will provide some examples of idea management software you can buy to build your own innovation management system…

Michael Shrivathsan

I'm your author, Michael Shrivathsan. I've worked at several innovative companies in Silicon Valley, USA over the past two decades - and helped innovate 5 market-leading products. I'm also a USPTO patent recipient. For my day job, I'm the VP of Product Management at Accompa - we make IdeaGlow, a cloud based idea management software.

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