12 Best Idea Management Tools for Remote Work

"Everything Begins With An Idea." – Earl Nightingale
And for your idea, we have selected the best idea management tools.

What is idea management? 💡

Idea management, in general, is the process of gathering ideas and insights from across the organization (employees, partners and customers) and communicating them using a common platform. It is exactly what the two words say, managing ideas.

Why should you use an idea management tool?

As your remote organization starts to scale its business and teams become distributed across geographies, there is a high risk of individual departments getting siloed. Information gaps are created which eventually leads to ideas getting lost in translation. With incomplete information, the decision making process can also be biased. Planbox puts together an elaborate step-by-step process on creating an effective idea management process, and it's obvious that tools will make your life much easier considering that the list they've put together is pretty big.

An idea management tool can help you preserve the synergy between different departments within the organization and extract the best value out of each of them.

Essentials of idea management tools

Ideally, the tool must have two features, as mentioned below, to fit in the innovation cycle (which can be different for companies) of an organization:

• Simple and easy-to-use UI - This is an absolute essential, given that the process of idea documentation should not be interrupted with us trying to figure out where or how to put down those ideas in the tool. You can check out Sprint Boards for a great example!


• Idea archives driven by analytics - Just because you cannot use an idea now, doesn’t mean the idea is useless. Idea archives can give deeper insights over time, as is the case with Spigit.
  

Below is our list of handpicked idea management tools that are apt for remote teams.