On September 8th Forrester released a paper describing why innovation management tools are slow to penetrate the market.

I will summarise their findings below:

1. Failing to keep endusers engaged. Projects start of with great enthusiasm but quickly the enthusiasm of the users fades. Forrester states that tools are getting more advanced in keeping users interested. We agree that enthusiasm easily fades, however the solution is not so much in the tool. Too often the tools are selected by ICT department that technically implement the tool but do not have enough eye or mandate for the organisational aspects of innovation management.
2. It’s hard to quantify the immediate benefits of Innovation Management tools in terms of ROI. According to Forrester the best way to deal with this is to rely on real cases, story telling and word of mouth.
3. “I cannot invest time or money in this right now.” This argument is heard because Innovation management is not yet well understood among mainstream enterprise buyers and the current financial markets are not favourable for investment decisions. We expected to see an effect of the current financial crisis. However, it seems that the awareness of the market is increasing. The bottom line is that we are seeing an increase in interest in these tools compared to previous years.
4. “We’ve tried Sharepoint, and it doesn’t work very well.” The fact that people have the idea that they can manage innovation through sharepoint indicates the lack of understanding of innovation. If becoming more innovative was just a matter of building some functions on top of Sharepoint, why are so few companies successful at innovating? Managing innovation is not easy and good tools to support innovation management are sophisticated.
5. “My innovation process doesn’t revolve around software tools.” Forrester agrees there are a healthy number of successfully innovating companies that do not rely on tools. They agree that best practices around culture and processes are important. However, innovative processes and cultures can be very well supported by tools. Forrester states that fundamentally, innovation success hinges on the triadic alignment of people, process, and technology.