8 Best Corporate Innovation Tools To Consider in 2025

Choosing the right corporate innovation tool is crucial to enhance your organization’s innovation processes and achieve strategic objectives. 

However, with numerous options available, it can be challenging to determine which tool best fits your needs.

That’s where we step in. 

We’ve compiled a list of the 8 best corporate innovation tools to help you find the one to enhance your innovation processes and drive meaningful results. 

Let’s dive in!

Why Do You Need Corporate Innovation Tools?

Besides contributing to your market position and, subsequently, your revenue growth, corporate innovation tools provide additional benefits:

Adapting to a Disruptive Market Landscape

The rise of agile startups leveraging the latest technologies has forced corporations to rethink their strategies. 

Thus, you must innovate continuously to keep pace with rapid marketplace changes.

Staying Ahead of Industry Trends

By leveraging competitive intelligence and technology intelligence, you can make informed decisions to boost innovation efforts and ensure you remain competitive. 

Facilitating Collaboration and Communication

With innovation tools, you can foster collaboration across teams and departments, breaking down silos that often affect innovation efforts. 

This centralized approach ensures you efficiently capture, evaluate, and act upon ideas.

Cultivate a Culture of Innovation

Innovation tools provide structured frameworks and methodologies for exploring new ideas, allowing your team to break free from conventional thinking patterns, think outside the box, and approach challenges from novel perspectives.

The flexibility that these tools have can encourage your team to think outside the box, experiment with different solutions, and ultimately implement their ideas.

8 Best Corporate Innovation Tools You Should Pay Attention to

Here’s a breakdown of each tool’s main characteristics.

*All pros and cons are based on G2, Capterra, Software Advice, and Gartner user reviews.

1. rready

rready provides an all-in-one corporate innovation solution with tooling to facilitate idea generation, evaluation, and implementation in a structured and engaging way.

We enable you to create transparency in projects via our platform and eliminate typical hurdles to innovation, such as:

• Your employees not being motivated enough to submit ideas, 
• The inability to track ideas and their progress and business impact.
• Lack of method and approach in place to execute ideas after an innovation initiative like workshops, hackathons, etc.

Our innovation solution revolves around 3 key innovation toolings:

• rready Idea Management 
• KICKBOX Intrapreneurship and
• rready Innovation Management.

1. rready Idea Management 

rready Idea Management optimizes the innovation process within organizations by enabling efficient idea sourcing, assessment, and management. 

The platform includes task assignment and tracking tools, allowing your teams to manage tasks efficiently.

Your employees can provide immediate feedback on ideas, promoting collaboration and refinement.

In addition, we provide you with extensive customization options tailored to your unique needs. 

This includes personalized onboarding, workflows, and roles you can assign as needed, ensuring that the system aligns with your existing processes and strategies.

2. KICKBOX Intrapreneurship

The KICKBOX Intrapreneurship program is based on the Kickbox methodology, and is an innovative framework that empowers employees within your organization to act as intrapreneurs.

It encourages the generation, validation, and implementation of ideas while fostering a culture of innovation.

What makes the Kickbox methodology particularly impactful, is that it promotes empowerment by allowing employees to take ownership of their ideas, thereby decentralizing the innovation process. 

Employees are required to manage their budgets and seek necessary resources from within or outside the organization, such as expert consultations or prototyping services.

3. rready Innovation Management

Our tool offers a complete suite for managing the entire innovation portfolio.

The unified platform comprises tools for idea management and through the proven Kickbox methodology, it enables innovators across your organization to validate and implement their ideas effectively.

Therefore, you can centralize innovation management and:

• Efficiently manage and track idea progress in your admin panel and use filters and search options for quick organization.
• Tailor workflows to meet your specific needs by defining custom phases and flows.
• Log in securely and easily with SSO and Active Directory.   
• Facilitate idea sourcing by organizing them into different topics and categories. Employees can submit their ideas for specific projects and topics within a particular time frame, etc.
• Launch campaigns via the platform. 
• Rate ideas using scorecards and feedback tools.

This way, you can manage and keep track of your entire innovation funnel in a comprehensive manner and ensure that no innovation opportunity goes unnoticed.

Tools that Add Value

Engagement Tools

To enhance engagement, KICKBOX incorporates gamification strategies that make the innovation process more interactive and educational for employees.

For example, you can:

• Enable digital wallets your employees can use to book experts.
• Provide innovators with access to necessary tools and coaching for their innovation journey.

The Method Toolbox, an integral element of the Kickbox methodology, is a physical box that contains various gamified tools to make innovation fun and tangible.

It provides your employees with hands-on experience of the innovation process by guiding them through. 

Thus, your employees will know exactly where they are in the process and what the next steps are.

Furthermore, the toolbox is packed with actionable templates, maps, and canvases to assist employees in structuring their ideas. 

Data Analytics

You can track various metrics, including how engaged employees are with the platform, their progress, etc., create custom reports, and visualize key statistics.

Overall, rready provides an integrated platform that supports idea generation, execution, and analytics while boosting collaboration and engagement. 

Pricing

Getting a budget for innovation is a great hurdle, so our pricing is tailored to your specific needs, operating on a modular pricing model. 

2. InnovationCast

InnovationCast is a collaborative innovation management software that facilitates employees’ idea generation, co-creation, and problem-solving.

It helps you engage your workforce in the innovation process through various modules, including an innovation radar, analytics, project management, and engagement tools.

Key Features:

• Innovation Projects & Portfolio 

Helps you plan your innovation projects and define the key tasks and milestones to validate an idea.

In addition, it also tracks the appropriate metrics for each project and balances your innovation portfolio.

• Innovation Radars

Enable you to organize and visualize your information to assess the potential and impact of innovation opportunities.

• Innovation Scouting & Foresight

Facilitate information sharing between employees, organize information in channels, and monitor emerging changes in technology, markets, etc. 

• Innovation Community Tools

Boosts communication and enables you to run different communities for distinct audiences, create external communities to collaborate outside your company, etc.

• Innovation Recognition & Rewards

Enables incorporation of gamification elements, such as points systems, badges, financial and non-financial types of rewards, etc., to acknowledge idea contributors.

Pricing

InnovationCast has 3 Premium Plans.

3. HYPE Innovation

HYPE innovation is an innovation management software with a particular focus on collaboration, lifecycle management, and analytics.

Key Features:

• HYPE Board — Collaboration boards that allow you to categorize input, feedback or ideas and automate repetitive tasks and workflow. 

• HYPE Innovation Tool — Allows you to “follow” the idea cycle and track and manage all related activities and launch targeted innovation campaigns.

• Analytics Tools — Measure the impact of innovation efforts and track KPIs.
• Customization — You can create layered categories with subcategories and configure fields like dropdowns, multi-select menus, and free text boxes.

Pricing

HYPE Innovation’s pricing is based on your goals, challenges, and requirements.

4. IdeaScale

IdeaScale is an innovation management platform that uses crowdsourcing to help you collect, develop, and implement ideas from your communities.

It integrates with various collaboration and project management tools.

Key Features:

• Idea Submission and Management

Employees can submit ideas, comment on them, and vote for others' suggestions, to prioritize ideas based on community interest and engagement.

Furthermore, ideas can be organized by vote count, total views, and stage scores. 

• Idea Portfolio

Allows you to track all of your ideas throughout your campaigns and identify bottlenecks as well as ideas that took off.

• Custom Widgets

Create widgets that link to articles, resources, online learning platforms, or any other content you want your team to access.

• Online Whiteboard

Allows you to do real-time brainstorming and use diagrams, flows, maps, and boards.

You can also attach Kanban-style tasks.

• Innovation templates and Building Blocks

Hosts various templates, such as Innovation Matrix, Empathy Map, Cause Analysis, 5 Whys, Storytelling, Business Model Canvas, etc.

Pricing

IdeaScale offers tailored pricing plans based on your company's specific features, scope, and needs.

5. Ideawake

Ideawake is an idea management platform that helps you capture, evaluate, and implement employee and stakeholder ideas.

The platform provides resources for setting up innovation programs, including training for users and ongoing support through workshops, surveys, etc.

Key Features:

• Idea Collection and Evaluation

You can submit ideas through customizable forms, making it easy to gather input from various sources, including employees and customers.

• Real-Time Collaboration

Enables you to collaborate in real-time, provide feedback and insights on submitted ideas, have crowd voting, leave comments, etc.

• Analytics and Reporting

Provide access to customizable dashboards that allow you to track engagement metrics, idea pipeline health, and overall impact quickly.

• Gamification

The platform incorporates gamification elements such as leaderboards and prizes to enhance engagement.

• Integrations

Ideawake has integrations with versatile enterprise tools and apps.

Pricing

Ideawake has 3 Premium licensing plans.

6. Wazoku

Wazoku is an innovation management platform that provides tools for idea submission, collaboration, gamification, and analytics.

It comprises an open innovation marketplace and proprietary idea management software.

Key Features:

• Idea Crowdsourcing  — Allows you to involve diverse stakeholders to crowdsource ideas and develop them further.
• Idea Evaluation Tools — Enable you to assign review groups to assess an idea based on custom scorecarding criteria.
• Collaboration & Engagement Tools — Allows your team to collaborate in real time, comment on ideas, rank entries using voting, etc. In addition, you can offer customizable rewards, such as gift vouchers, extra time off, etc., to enhance employee engagement.
• Custom Workflow Configuration — Enables you to create custom workflows regarding developing, evaluating, and selecting ideas, tailored to your organization’s processes.
• Portfolio Management — Helps you manage and track your innovation initiatives across the R.I.S.E framework stages.

Pricing

Wazoku has 3 packages with custom pricing based on your business needs.

7. ITONICS

ITONICS is an AI-powered platform that helps you identify emerging technologies, trends, and market potential.

The platform integrates various tools and frameworks to support innovation efforts.

Key Features:

• Innovation OS — Integrates all innovation management activities into one platform and helps you analyze trends and technologies, drive ideation campaigns, manage project portfolios, etc.
• Trend and Technology Radar — Visualizes drivers of change, allowing you to identify future business opportunities and threats. It can also create an early warning system for emerging trends and technologies.
• Ideation and Collaboration Tools — Leverages generative AI to streamline ideation processes and supports ideation campaigns and collaboration.
• Portfolio Management — Helps you compare, monitor, and evaluate projects in an agile manner.

Pricing

ITONICS has multiple pricing plans for various stages of innovation journey, each with a 30-day Free Trial.

8. Qmarkets

Qmarkets is an enterprise innovation management platform that helps you boost innovation capabilities through structured idea management and collaboration.

Besides technical integrations, Qmarkets also offers integrations with various apps.

Key Features:

• Q-ideate

An idea management tool that helps you gather and spot converting ideas and prioritize them.

• Multiple Workspaces

You can create multiple workspaces tailored to different innovation challenges or methodologies.

• Challenge Setup

Here, you’ll find set-up features to build challenges for your audiences. 

Thus, you can create dedicated challenges around a specific topic, make ad-hoc submissions, do audience segmentation, create a collaborative deal-flow process, etc.

• Engagement & Communication

Host various automated communication tools to notify about a relevant action, update, or activity. 

In addition, it offers gamification elements, such as points, badges, and incentives, and a centralized hub for viewing and managing open tasks or innovation solutions.

• Incubation & Implementation

Provides tools to get a clear overview of your process and the innovations at each stage.

You can track your progress across different workflow stages, do bulk updating and managing, etc.

Pricing

Qmarkets doesn’t disclose pricing, but it depends on the project's size and scope, the number of users, use cases, and features.

In addition, Qmarkets offers Software as a Service (SaaS) through an annual license fee, whereas on-premise deployment involves a higher up-front cost. 

How to Choose The Right Corporate Innovation Tool?

Before we wrap up, let’s highlight the key factors you should consider when picking a robust corporate innovation tool.

One solution ticks all the above boxes, providing an all-encompassing idea and innovation management tools to encourage employees to develop ideas and guide them throughout the process.

Enter, rready! 

How rready Helps You Bring Your Innovation Management to a Higher Level

rready's innovation management solutions help to streamline your innovation process end to end, from your first steps through to more complex initiatives.

With rready, you can:

• Harness the full potential of your employees via idea management tools.
• Engage employees at all levels in the innovation process, from idea generation to execution.
• Get a structured yet flexible framework for fostering innovation from within.
• Remain cost-effective by investing funds where you can create the most value: in executing ideas.
• Scale and expand your innovation initiatives across multiple divisions and large teams.
• Foster a culture of innovation using  KICKBOX intrapreneurship and drive company-wide growth.

And the list goes on.

Learn More:

• Corporate Innovation Myths: It's Not as Risky as You Think
• Innovation vs. Invention in Corporate Dynamics
• How to Create an Innovation Culture