Advisory: A Buyer's Guide to Innovation Management Software

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Some of the most successful case studies for enterprise social computing revolve around dedicated ideation and innovation management initiatives.

Vendors have taken note, and in recent years, the enterprise innovation management software marketplace has become quite crowded, with hundreds of vendors. This may come as a surprise to prospective enterprise customers of this technology who could rightly ask why they need separate innovation management software at all, when they already license an enterprise collaboration platform with social networking and enterprise Q&A features.

It turns out that innovation management has emerged as a fairly specialized domain, with specific feature sets and business process support that goes beyond what you find in a more generic collaboration and social technology platform.

In this advisory briefing, we first describe the most common features of innovation management software. Using this as the foundation, we then discuss the use cases of innovation management software. This will help you establish whether you need specialist innovation software or not. If you do need specialist innovation solutions, we provide the key criteria for selecting the right vendor. You’ll then find a brief list of the leading innovation management software vendors. We conclude with detailed profiles of five major vendors in this space.