The cut-throat competition prevalent in the business environment today stimulates enterprises to be technologically enabled and in possession of world-class IT infrastructure and best-of-the-breed applications. However, with technological enhancements becoming a regular feature today, enterprises also tend to upgrade and adopt new technology and software applications as and when available. Nevertheless, to withstand the competition, enterprises also look forward to bringing out innovations in products, services and functional areas of the business process. Every business is not always smooth sailing and when faced with issues and problems the project team or the management works towards understanding the problem and looks for ideas to solve the same. Irrespective of the industry, innovations results from ideas captured and nurtured from both external and internal sources. Ideas generated and captured are used for developing innovation products for higher profit generation and market penetration. Innovation which is represented in three distinct phases includes creation and idea capture, idea assessment and idea implementation. Besides encouraging innovative thinking these three phases help in creating a culture of innovation in the business environment. Enterprises thus fosters a culture of innovation by implementing a platform for idea capture. The tools developed by the leading service providers help enterprises to use multiple channels to source ideas. Other features of the idea capture tools include: * Ability to screen ideas and evaluate these on the basis of formal and informal work flow * Ability to avoid duplication of ideas * Auto filtration and report generation of the various stages of idea capture, nurturing, participation rates and turnaround times in converting ideas into products or services. Pfizer's Idea Farm is a no-cost internal service which has faced nearly 240 challenges over four years and has benefited the enterprise with a saving of about $20 million. With the need to crystallize employee’s role in innovation IBM Corp also created their own internal idea capture tool “ThinkPlace” program. This tool from the IBM innovation team allows inventive ideas to mature into innovative solutions that are rapidly developed and deployed. Further, this tool enables their 300,000 strong workforce to share their ideas, which are then sorted and ranked by popularity either manually or with the help of a software. Furthermore the idea management system helps management to easily work through the process of idea capture idea capture and help nurture good ideas from the environment. “ThinkPlace” the idea captureidea capture tool besides offering the knowledge workers opportunities for creativity and innovation within the organization also lead to a lot of innovations in IBM's new product development as well as its internal improvement. This open, collaborative and global platform that allows tapping into the collective expertise of the employees across various locations has helped lay the groundwork for IBM's success. Read More About: idea management, crowdsourcing tools, idea management solutions, innovative management solutions
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