For innovation teams

Software for innovation teams that have to show results

Software for innovation teams should do the repetitive work so a small team can run a company-wide program. Brainstormer collects ideas through challenges, expands and scores them against your strategy with AI, tracks every decision and produces a board report per challenge.

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01
Unlimited challenges on Business and Enterprise
02
Weighted strategic goals that drive every AI score
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Duplicate detection and theme grouping across hundreds of ideas
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Audit trail CSV and board report for leadership

The bottleneck is triage, not ideas

Most innovation teams are two to five people supporting an entire company. When a campaign works, it produces hundreds of ideas of uneven quality, many of them repeats, and the team spends weeks reading, rewriting and sorting before the review panel can even meet. Momentum drops, submitters hear nothing, and the next campaign gets fewer ideas.

Brainstormer takes that first pass off the team. Each two-sentence submission is expanded into a structured idea with a problem, a solution, a first step and a success measure. Similar ideas are flagged and can be merged in one click, keeping every author and vote. Ideas are grouped into themes, so the panel reviews ten clusters instead of three hundred rows.

Where an innovation team spends its hours, before and after
Recurring job	Manual way	In Brainstormer
Reading and cleaning submissions	Hours per campaign	AI expands each idea into problem, solution, first step, measure
Finding repeats	Reading everything twice	Duplicates detected and merged, authors and votes kept
Making sense of the list	Affinity mapping by hand	Ideas grouped into themes per challenge
First pass scoring	Panel scores from scratch	Impact, cost, risk and fit scored against weighted goals
Reporting upward	Custom deck each quarter	Board report with ranking, themes and stage counts

Scores tied to strategy, not taste

You describe the company and set three to six strategic goals with weights, for example customer retention at 30 percent of the weight, operating cost at 25 and new revenue at 45. AI scores each idea on impact, cost, risk and strategic fit from 1 to 10 and calculates a weighted total with a written rationale.

The score is a starting point for the conversation, not a verdict. The panel still moves ideas through the stages, and every move is logged with who, when, from which stage to which, and a note. When leadership asks why an idea was rejected, the answer is on record. Read more in idea prioritization and idea clustering.

Campaigns with a start, a deadline and a readout

Programs lose credibility when campaigns never close. Each challenge has a question, a description, a deadline and an open or closed status. Good questions are specific, such as "How could we cut customer onboarding time in half?" rather than "Any ideas to improve?". The innovation challenge software page covers how to frame them.

When a challenge closes, the board report summarizes the ranking, the themes, how many ideas sit in each stage and a recommendation. Print it to PDF from the browser, or download Markdown and CSV to reuse in your own reporting. For the wider portfolio view, see innovation management software.

When the suggestion box or the Teams template stops working

Most innovation teams inherit a starting point: a shared inbox, a form feeding a SharePoint list, a physical box in the break room or the Employee Ideas template in Microsoft Teams. Each one collects ideas well enough. What none of them gives you is the part an innovation team is judged on, a visible decision for every idea and a ranking leadership trusts.

If you are replacing a form or a box, the suggestion box software page shows how statuses, votes and recorded decisions close the loop with the people who submitted. If your company started with the Power Apps template, the Employee Ideas app alternative page compares the two side by side, and our breakdown of the Employee Ideas Power App cost works out the licensing bill at 25, 150 and 1,000 people. Running on SharePoint lists instead? Read SharePoint idea management options and what they cost first.

When HR runs engagement and culture campaigns next to your innovation challenges, brainstorming software for HR teams describes how both groups share one workspace, and why employee suggestion programs fail lists the seven failure modes to design out before launch.

Roles and plans for an innovation team

The owner holds billing. Admins, usually the innovation team, run challenges, reviews, stages and reports. Members submit ideas and vote. Invitations go out by email and people join from the link.

Business at $399 a month billed yearly ($4,788 a year) or $798 month to month covers up to 150 members, unlimited challenges, weighted goals, the board report, the admin role and the audit trail CSV. Enterprise at $999 a month billed yearly covers up to 1,000 members and adds full workspace export, an invoice with company details and priority email support with a first reply within one business day.

Yearly billing saves 50 percent. See pricing and start your workspace the same day.

Questions

How many challenges can we run at once?

Team allows 3 open challenges at a time. Business and Enterprise have no limit on challenges.

Can we change the strategic goals later?

Yes. Goals and weights belong to the workspace, and you can update them when the strategy changes. New scores use the current weights.

Does the AI decide which ideas go ahead?

No. It expands, scores and groups ideas and writes a rationale. People move ideas between stages, and each move is recorded with a note.

Can we export our data?

Every plan exports ideas as CSV. Business and Enterprise add the audit trail CSV, and Enterprise adds a full workspace export.