In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, innovation has become a cornerstone of success. Organizations are constantly seeking new ways to foster creativity and generate groundbreaking ideas that drive growth. A great way to accomplish that is to run an innovation challenge. To facilitate this process, an innovation challenge platform is a vital tool. This article will delve into a comparison of 7 different innovation challenge software, analyzing their pros, and cons, helping you make an informed decision on choosing your innovation challenge platform.
We evaluated 7 different innovation challenge software that had listed idea campaigns as a feature in G2 or mentioned innovation challenges in their website. The reviews are based on our own trial experience of the software, or if it wasn't available, the evaluations in review sites such as G2 and Capterra. Here’s the list of the innovation challenge platforms that I’ll cover in this article.
Ideanote is a platform where you can start an idea-collection and open it to your organization or the crowd. It is a template-based idea platform, where you can collect and manage ideas. Unfortunately, there wasn't a pre-made template available for the innovation challenge, so you need to create your challenge from scratch. However, once you have built the template, you can save it for future use.
Ideanote excels in the collection and management of ideas, offering features such as task automation and AI assistance in ideation. It also provides the possibility for participants to comment, or vote on ideas. It is not the easiest platform to run your challenge with, so be prepared to take your time to learn the best practices.
Image source: Ideanote
In our experience, it may not be the most user-friendly for challenges, as there is no straightforward process. It can be confusing for participants to understand what is currently happening, as there are no clear timelines for the challenge or its phases and you have to manually move the ideas between the phases in Kanban. But if you are not looking for a straightforward approach, you'll certainly appreciate the appealing visuals and AI-powered idea generation it offers.
Our innovation platform Orchidea has solutions for all innovation activities from AI-powered team brainstorming to crowdsourcing. We have a deep focus on innovation engagement and making collaboration with all stakeholders effortless. That's why including both internal and external audiences is made simple with email invitations, shareable links, and guest participation with or without registration.
In Orchidea, there is a dedicated challenge feature with a user-friendly built-in process from idea collection to decision-making. You can choose from two idea contest templates with pre-set phases or adjust them as you wish. Orchidea provides also useful features like voting and reporting. With Orchidea, you can start and manage the challenge with ease and customize it to suit your issue.
One of the perks of Orchidea is the easiness of creating and running innovation challenges. Set up your challenge in just 30 seconds and start collecting ideas. You don't have to build the challenge process yourself and it's easy to follow for all. Alternatively, you can leverage the adaptability of our process. Delete phases, change names, adjust the settings, and fine-tune it to suit your specific requirements.
Viima is a platform in which you can collect and manage ideas. You can collect ideas on different boards and use a template to start an innovation challenge. Their innovation challenge is a board where you can add your ideas and also comment and like others' ideas. Viima has a drag-and-drop feature on Kanban to change the status of the ideas for example from submitting ideas to voting.
While the template does provide different statuses, it unfortunately lacks clear timelines or schedules for each step. You must move ideas one by one in Kanban between the statuses. As a result, managing the innovation challenge process is not as efficient in our experience. This can make it unclear for participants to understand what they should focus on without clear scheduled phases.
On the other hand, Viima stands out with its visuality, offering a wide range of options to visually explore and analyze ideas. So, if you are not looking for a systematic approach and enjoy the visual features more, Viima can be a great tool for your innovation challenges.
Image source: Viima
Brightidea is a platform focused on innovation and crowdsourcing. In the Brightidea challenge, you can open the contest to the crowd and let them submit, comment, and vote ideas. Brightidea has plenty of features for the management of the challenge. You can analyze the challenge in the dashboard as well as customize the submission forms to your specific needs.
Unfortunately, it doesn't offer transparent pricing or a free trial to try the challenge. As a result, we were unable to personally review Brightidea ourselves. However, we have gathered information from reputable sources such as G2, Capterra, and other review sites to provide you with an overview of its features.
Based on reviews on G2, Capterra, and other review sites
With Accept Mission, you can start an innovation challenge by launching a mission. Mission is an open idea box, where you can engage participants to share their ideas as well as comment and like others' ideas. You can also make use of gamification elements like rewards and undercover mode.
Accept Mission doesn't offer a phased innovation challenge process. You can launch a mission with a deadline, but you must do it all from ideation to voting and commenting within that same period. You need to integrate the challenge into a funnel, where you can move the ideas between the stages using Kanban and keep track of the progress of each idea. However, processing the ideas wasn't very intuitive and took time to figure out.
Image source: Accept Mission
In our experience, starting an innovation challenge is still fairly simple. Creating the challenge description was made effortless with the help of AI assistance in the briefing. It would be beneficial to have more flexibility when inviting participants, as the current options are limited to adding participants via email or integrating with Teams or Zapier. Moreover, all guests are required to register as users.
Wazoku is a challenge-driven innovation management solution, especially for bigger enterprises. With Wazoku, you can open the challenge to the Wazoku Crowd, where anyone can join in, or launch a challenge internally in your organization.
Wazoku offers a comprehensive challenge process that includes steps for each operation, such as submitting ideas, development, discussion, initial assessment, further development, final evaluation, and implementation. Additionally, you have the flexibility to add or remove these stages according to your specific needs.
Wazoku and Orchidea stand out as the only platforms in this review that offer precise, scheduled phases. These phases automatically progress according to the set schedule, making it convenient and straightforward for users and facilitators.
Unfortunately, Wazoku doesn't offer transparent pricing or a free trial, so we didn't get to review it ourselves. So here's what we found from G2, Capterra, and other review sites.
Based on reviews on G2, Capterra, and other review sites
OpenIDEO is an open innovation platform focused on crowdsourcing challenges. It collaborates with sponsor organizations to host challenges for a global community to solve societal problems using the design thinking model. This process involves exploration, concept creation, and prototyping. Insights from these challenges have informed process and product improvements.
Challenges leverage crowdsourcing, uniting diverse communities to accelerate impact through shared insights and iterative idea development. They offer events, mentorship, tools, funding, and more to aid in scaling and implementing solutions.
OpenIDEO operates a little differently from the other challenge platforms in this article. OpenIDEO challenges are more like a service than only a platform to run the challenges with. If you have a societal issue, you can team up with OpenIDEO, and open a challenge where anyone can join in to share their insights. Also, the OpenIDEO team helps with the facilitation of the challenge. The open challenges will be found on OpenIDEO's website and you can participate in as many as you want. The power of OpenIDEO thus lies in crowdsourcing.
To sum this up, it is fair to say that each innovation challenge software has its pros and cons and there is no absolute best tool over others. What you are looking for determines the best platform for you.
You should take a minute and decide which qualities are most vital for you and what is your use case. Also, consider if you want a platform only for running challenges, or also, for example, idea management, brainstorming, or always-open idea collection. Some of the idea contest platforms, for example, Orchidea and Viima offer more features than just the challenge.
Also, consider how much time you are willing to spend on learning how to use the software or to host an innovation challenge. Of course, the best way is to try the innovation competition platform yourself. Orchidea, Accept Mission, Viima, and Ideanote offer a chance to try the challenge yourself. You can explore Orchidea for free here.
If you want a platform where you can start a structured campaign with ease and make both facilitation and participation a breeze, Orchidea might be your choice. If you are looking for an open idea box without a clear schedule and appreciate visual ways to monitor ideas, you might consider Ideanote or Viima. And if you are a large enterprise seeking a platform for challenges and crowdsourcing only, Wazoku or openIDEO might be your choice.
Hopefully, this comparison helps you to pick the best innovation challenge platform for you. Have you used any of these before? Share your experiences in the comments below!
Note: The article was written on August 2023 and features of the reviewed tools might change after writing.