How to find software for the innovation work current categories don’t cover

The first post in this series claimed that most innovation management software is built for collecting and managing concepts or ideas. That work precedes the incubation stage, which is the harder part and where the bulk of real, productive corporate innovation work happens.

You do not have to take our word for it. The leading software directories say so themselves.

If you have shopped for business software recently you have probably ended up on one of the large review directories. G2 and Capterra are the two biggest. They organize software products into categories, collect user reviews, and are where most software searches begin.

The innovation software category is defined as ‘Idea Management’, in the directories’ own words

Search either one for innovation management software and you get a well-populated category. G2 defines it this way: idea management software, also called innovation management software, structures the process of gathering insights and then organizing and managing those ideas. Capterra makes the same equation, and describes the products as ones that let companies solicit, collect, sort and evaluate ideas.

The two terms are treated as the same thing, and the definition stops at ideas.

So a team looking for software to help with the main work of new product or business innovation will not find a clear category to search. That does not mean solutions do not exist. It means there’s not a named, established category for what they need: software purpose-built for business case and strategy hypothesis modeling, and for innovation portfolio management.

The established categories buyers might try instead

When the innovation category does not fit, there are a handful of others a buyer reaches for. Each is a real discipline with serious products behind it. Individually or collectively, though, they don’t really address the need.

Project and portfolio management. To be listed here a product has to define portfolio types, manage dependencies, allocate resources across portfolios and projects, and give portfolio-level visibility into timelines and performance. It is built for running a portfolio of work the company has already committed to.

Strategic planning and execution. Built to take a strategy leadership has already set and drive it through the organization: goals and objectives cascaded to teams, initiatives aligned to them, and delivery tracked on dashboards and scorecards.

Product roadmapping and issue tracking. Sequencing, staging and prioritizing features for a product line, and managing the issues that come back from the field.

Stage-gate governance. Structures the review itself. The stages a project moves through, the criteria it is assessed against at each one, and the record of what was decided.

Financial planning and forecasting. A large and well-populated category. G2 scopes its FP&A products to helping financial analysts, managers and CFOs align financial management with business strategy through planning, forecasting and budgeting, analyzing financial scenarios, and comparing projected results against actual business performance.

What often fills the gap, though, is not software from any of those categories. It is whatever the team already has.

Most enterprise innovation teams cobble together a fragmented patchwork of PowerPoint templates and Excel models for strategy development, evaluation, and portfolio tracking. Around that sit generic project management tools, product roadmap and issue trackers, a wiki or shared workspace holding the research, and increasingly a general-purpose AI chat window doing the thinking out loud.

The patchwork is not a sign of a lazy team. It is what happens when there is no established category for the software the work actually needs.

Where the established categories hit or fall short for incubation-stage innovation

Set those categories against the problems innovation teams actually describe, and it becomes clearer where help exists and where it does not.

Ideation and crowdsourcing does not reach the incubation work directly. It produces the candidates that incubation begins from. That is a real job, and a team whose pipeline is genuinely empty should buy here. But a thin idea pool is rarely what an innovation team is stuck on.

Product roadmapping does not reach it either. It assumes committed product lines and the question is feature prioritization and staging. An early-stage venture has neither a committed product line nor a presumable future to sequence.

Project and portfolio management reaches some of the real problems: comparing bets that are nothing alike, and maybe even deciding how large the innovation fund should be. But it does so on core-business resource terms. The evaluation criteria may have some overlap with exploratory innovation, but what differs is how much weight each one carries, and whether that weighting is allowed to change with the class of the bet and the stage it has reached. One scoring model run across everything favors the projects whose forecasts are most confident, and the most confident forecasts belong to the most incremental work. Run that way for a few cycles and the portfolio fills with small, safe bets while the exploratory ones starve.

Strategic planning and execution is the layer above new business development, and it matters. It is also a different activity. It aligns an organization behind a strategy and tracks whether that strategy is being delivered. It does not develop one. An early-stage venture’s strategy has not been set yet, and developing, modeling and testing it is the part an innovation team often needs help with.

Stage-gate governance is the closest fit among these categories, for one part of the need. What it generally does not do is reach the work underneath the review: defining the venture’s strategy hypothesis, analyzing it, and gathering the evidence that is supposed to be on the table when the gate arrives. A gate inherits whatever rigor happened before it.

Financial planning and forecasting reaches the numbers, but for the wrong side of the business. These are tools for planning a business that already exists: budgets built against last year, forecasts measured against actual performance. An early-stage venture has no actuals to compare against and no history to extrapolate from, and the users these products are built for are accounting and finance teams rather than innovation teams. Putting ranged inputs on a market nobody has sized yet is a very different problem from explaining a variance from history or budget.

The patchwork fails on a single project before it ever fails across a portfolio. Each venture gets analyzed to whatever depth the person running it chose. The assumptions driving a conclusion live somewhere other than the conclusion, so a reviewer sees the result without seeing what it rests on, and cannot tell which assumptions are the most consequential. Nothing carries forward, so the next team starts from a blank document, and the method lives in whoever set it up and leaves when they do. And because none of these tools carries a method of its own, teams import one: a similarly patchworked collection of innovation and strategy canvases and frameworks, adapted into slides and spreadsheets. Those bring a difficulty of their own. Canvases and frameworks are introduced and explained with finished, already-worked examples, a complete strategy mapped neatly into the boxes, and mapping an already-defined strategy into a canvas is a completely different exercise from using one to define a strategy that is still forming.

Across a portfolio all of it compounds. Every team builds its financial model differently, every strategy gets framed in a different format, and rolling up portfolio-level investment performance becomes a manual rebuild every time, and two projects arriving at the same gate have not been held to the same standard. What none of these alternatives supplies, separately or together, is the set of capabilities the work actually needs: a structured, evaluable way to develop a venture’s business case and strategy hypothesis while its biggest choices are still open; financial modeling built for an opportunity with high uncertainty and no history to extrapolate from; evaluation criteria that can differ by the class of the bet and the stage it has reached; project management whose activities change from stage to stage rather than staying constant; and a portfolio view that all of it feeds without a manual rebuild. This blog series works through those one at a time.

Growth Forge® Software was built for corporate incubation

Growth Forge Software covers innovation venture strategy hypothesis definition, financial modeling, and analysis, with stage-gate governance and portfolio management around it. It is not an ideation or crowdsourcing product, and a company whose real problem is ‘not enough ideas’ should buy from that category instead.

Incubation means validating a hypothesis, so a hypothesis has to be defined and analyzed before anything can validate it. And a venture has to be run as a project, but with a focused pattern of stage-specific activities. Those are properties of the work, and any serious approach has to deal with both.

Growth Forge treats the venture’s strategy hypothesis as something you model: broken into discrete dimensions that can be examined one at a time and as a whole, so that a weak spot is visible rather than buried in a narrative. It scopes the validation work into named functions, evaluation against stage criteria, prioritizing assumptions, planning and running evidence gathering, framing the investment decision, each as its own guided tool rather than a blank document. That pattern is also how a way of working gets institutionalized, rather than living in one leader’s head or on a shared document you hope teams follow and interpret the same way. It ships with an innovation methodology informed by decades of experience, as a configurable starting point meant to be tuned to a portfolio’s own objectives and priorities. It’s opinionated, but not rigid.

The problems no software can resolve

Some of the most common incubation stage challenges have no simple software fix.

A forecast landing as a commitment is not a modeling failure. It happens because everywhere else in the company a number in a deck is a promise, so that is what decision makers assume it means here too. An organization rejecting businesses that are transformational or distant from its core is not an analysis failure either. And a business unit refusing a proven venture is usually a funding-model or governance mismatch, not a handover plan that needed to be better.

Growth Forge software can make each of these visible earlier. But, it cannot resolve any of them. What resolves them is a change in how the organization treats early-stage and exploratory work, and that change must be defined and championed inside the organization, by the person running the innovation function. An outside consultant can analyze what is currently happening, help design something better, and sometimes make an argument more easily because it comes from outside the politics. None of that substitutes for someone internal holding the ground afterwards.

The practical point for a buyer is this. If your hardest problems are those ones, no amount of further software shopping will turn up a product for them, but an innovation consultant (like BRI Associates) can probably help.

Before you compare another innovation software product

Work out which part of the innovation work you need help with first. Collecting ideas has a well-populated category built for it. Getting early-stage ventures from an ambiguous concept to something that can be evaluated, tested and compared against other bets in a portfolio has the fewest products behind it, and no appropriately defined product category, but it is often the part corporate innovation teams get stuck on.

The next post in this series will show how true innovation management software can help with one of the most significant incubation stage challenges: what to do with an ambiguous early-stage concept that still has its biggest choices unmade.

If the gap is not in how rigorously your ventures get defined, tested and compared, but in whether your organization is set up to handle that work at all, our Innovation Capability Assessment is a short scored read on where that stands.

BRI Associates helps companies grow by drawing on decades of practitioner experience in corporate innovation and new business development — practitioners, not pundits or academics — through direct consulting, training workshops, and Growth Forge® Software, built for the unique requirements of corporate innovation and growth organizations.