The Innovation Command Center
The Ultimate Innovation Management Software Platform
Our Customers Achieve Great Results
Peggie Pelosi
Executive Director
Almost overnight Praxie created a customized solution for our 100 member organizations across Canada to drive strategy and innovation. The Praxie team provided expert guidance and amazing support to our internal team and users.
Kate Merton
Staff Vice President, Digital Care Delivery
Praxie’s innovation solution stood out from other options because it can be customized so quickly to fit our exact process requirements. Plus, it’s incredibly easy to use and manage.
Cento Sharp
Vice President, Business Transformation
Praxie’s platform is robust enough for any IT Department while being easily implemented and managed by the business.
Innovation Command Center Features
Unlike most innovation management systems, the Innovation Command Center is fully configurable and customizable. From the modules to the templates, to the process and dashboards, we ensure the best fit with your organization and culture.
Market Scanning & Growth Platforms
Scan the external environment to identify and prioritize the Growth Platforms that represent mega-trends, emerging markets and technologies, and the future disruptions that will become big opportunities.
Scan Market Trends, Customer Pain Points & Technologies
Innovation occurs at the intersection of market trends, customer pain points and emerging technologies that create solutions to important problems. Our market scanning tools and templates give you a clear process to collect, organize and prioritize information so it becomes insight – insight into the specific market opportunities that you should pursue. Integrate your own sources of data from market research and external databases to give teams specific information for their scans.
Gain Insight from Internal and External Databases
Insight comes from data. Integrate your own sources of data from market research and external databases to give teams specific information for their scans. Use our simple widgets to collect startup, competitor, and other information by creating and importing company profiles as part of your scanning process. Our growing library of scanning tools provides additional resources and sources of data, such as our clinical trials and PubMed web crawlers for the National Institutes of Health database.
Identify, Define & Prioritize Growth Platforms
The most innovative organizations don’t just start generating ideas. They step back and identify and prioritize the “growth platforms” that represent mega-trends, emerging market spaces, or future disruptions that will become big opportunities. Growth platforms then become the catalyst for additional research and ideation, which lead to portfolios of product, service, and business model concepts. Use our Growth Platform app to create your platform priorities to provide guidance for your ideation process, concept development and overall innovation portfolio management process.
Idea Generation and Innovation Portfolios
Fuel your innovation funnel through a simple idea generation processes with easily customizable concept templates. Classify, categorize, score, and prioritize ideas to advance the best products, services, processes or business models.
Define Your Innovation Challenges or Opportunities
Provide a Customizable Template to Keep Ideas Flowing
Use the New Idea Wizard to provide a common template for each idea, including a description, category, feasibility and value ratings. Easily customize the template to fit your team or organization’s specific needs, language, and culture.
Build on Ideas to Foster Collaborative Innovation
After you’ve brainstormed ideas, it can be helpful to “build” upon certain ideas to make them better. Just open an idea and tap the comment button on the bottom right of the idea template, enter a comment and it will be automatically posted and emailed to anyone who has chosen to follow that specific idea.
Organize and Categorize Your Ideas
Create groupings or themes for your ideas. Use categories to generate summary dashboards that outline your portfolio of ideas, including classifications such as products, services, business models, business processes, or anything else.
Prioritize Your Idea Portfolio
View your portfolio map based on the criteria used to score each idea. Identify your top ideas for further development.
Phases & Gates Development Process
Use a best practice approach to innovation management for developing new products, services, business models or processes. Create custom records for each new concept with tailored evaluation criteria and templates for each “gate” in the process.
Track Progress on the Phases & Gates Process Board
The Phases and Gates process board contains all of your active opportunities. As concepts are reviewed, they advance to the next column. Go to the board anytime to obtain a visual representation of your full portfolio and pipeline. View the detail of any concept and review current status, information about the opportunity, gate evaluation history, all completed best practice templates, and related files.
Define Innovation Opportunities using Best Practice Templates
The starting point for developing ideas and “proof of concepts” (POCs) involves fleshing out ideas in the form of “concepts” that clearly describe the new product, service, process, or business model. Add an unlimited number of concepts to your innovation portfolio using our proven best practice template. Customize the template to your unique specifications or organizational requirements.
Move Opportunities through Clear Phases and Gates
Advance opportunities across your pipeline through completing the different sections of the templates and conducting “Gate Reviews” where executive sponsors or innovation councils review and score concepts. Enter scores for each of the gate criteria, including business impact, ease of implementation, opportunity size and overall rating. Quickly and easily customize evaluation criteria and your review process.
Advance Leading Ideas Using Best Practice Tools or “Park” Them in an Archive
Based on the evaluation ratings during the gate reviews, concepts can be advanced to the next phase or archived. Each time you move a concept to the next phase, the template expands and additional pages are added at the bottom to reveal the next set of best practice tools and templates to complete as part of the next phase.
View Opportunities by Type, Business Case, and Priority
View real-time summary reports that classify opportunities and your portfolio by Innovation Type (Product, Service, Process and Business Model), Business Case (Revenue, Competitiveness, Brand Building, Cost Savings), and Priority (Business Critical, High, Medium, and Low). Create custom reports based on any unique criteria included in your templates.
View Financials for Individual Opportunities and the Overall Innovation Portfolio
View real-time summary reports that compare financial projections across opportunities and for your overall portfolio. Modify your template to include custom Pro Forma financial models and other financial data.
View & Export Detailed Dashboard Reports
The Summary Dashboard provides various reports including a Pipeline Report that summarizes your overall portfolio as an innovation pipeline, a Portfolio Map of your active concepts and many more.
External 'Open Innovation' Process Management
Identify and manage external sources of innovation for new technologies, prototypes, proof of concepts, and other solutions. Manage the full process related to finding, evaluating and developing with startups, universities, think tanks, suppliers, and other partners.
Get Ideas from External Innovators, Startups & Partners
Great innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Create idea competitions, challenges, or just simple input forms to solicit ideas and new opportunities from entrepreneurs, startups, partners or others. Provide as much context or structure as needed and link data forms directly from your website with our API. Use external innovators to feed your opportunity funnel.
Track and Manage External Relationships
Create a database of key external relationships including contact information, evaluation criteria, supporting documents like pitch decks or work statements, and more. Assign specific contacts to team members and track discussions over time. Use these targeted “CRM” features to ensure contacts and relationships are fully integrated into your innovation process.
Move Relationships Across Your Pipeline
Evaluate external contacts and move them along your open innovation pipeline based on the evolution of your relationships. Classify contacts based on your work with them such as phase of development or type of contribution or technology.
View Dashboard Summary Reports to Track Progress
View dashboard reports to track progress by type of relationship (e.g., university, startup, lab, incubator, etc.), stage of development, and more. Customize your contact records to create additional dashboard reports specific to your own organization.
Design Thinking & Strategic Tools for Innovation Teams
Give your teams the tools of the innovation trade. Connect pre-configured best practice templates in design thinking, lean startup, strategy, business modeling and project management to supercharge your innovation teams.
Give Innovation Project Teams the Tools for Success
The best innovation teams define clear objectives, set clear success metrics, and collaborate using leading edge approaches based on “lean” innovation practices, business model innovation frameworks, and disciplined project implementation. Create an unlimited number of Innovation Project Team workspaces that give your teams everything they need to be successful. Use our best practice templates and incorporate your own organization’s tools to create a fully customized work space that supports your innovation process.
Connect Internal Company Data, Documents and Tools
To ensure your teams’ success, connect existing data, documents, and collaboration tools directly into the Command Center to ensure tight linkages to other existing tools and processes.
Access a Growing Library of Design Thinking Templates
Our experts in design thinking continually update and add to our growing library of interactive tools and templates for design thinking, lean startup, and innovation project management.
Innovation Culture Best Practices
upBOARD’s solution is the only platform on the market that provides practical guidance on creating a culture of innovation using tools, templates and dashboards from the award-winning book The Invisible Advantage: How to Create a Culture of Innovation.
Get Innovation Culture Best Practices
Videos reveal best practices for innovation culture including the innovation process, leadership for innovation, innovation metrics, and more. Engage your team in reviewing the videos and exploring implications and opportunities for your own organization.
Assess Your Innovation Culture
Take the Invisible Advantage Culture Assessment to determine your company’s strengths and gaps related to innovation strategy, leadership, structure, process, people, metrics, and technology.
Prioritize Culture Change Priorities
Use the seven dimensions of the innovation culture map to prioritize your top opportunities for improving your innovation culture.
Create Your Innovation Culture Change Roadmap
The priority opportunities you identified, along with the specific best practices you select, are automatically placed into a three-step “roadmap” that gives you a clear game plan for moving forward.
Create Your Innovation Culture Dashboard
View a real-time dashboard to ensure your innovation culture program is on track over time. Track and measure innovation funding, training, rewards and recognition to ensure everyone is aligned around the most important levers for culture change.
Expert Training & Advice on Innovation Best Practices
Great software? Yes. But we give you something as important: Deep knowledge about what drives innovation, with expert guidance to create your innovation strategy and process.
Learn the latest best practices in innovation management from our resident innovation expert, Soren Kaplan. Video tutorials give your team the success factors for true strategic innovation.
Soren Kaplan is an Affiliate at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC’s Marshall School of Business, the “Innovate” columnist for Inc. Magazine, and author of the bestselling and award-winning innovation books Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage. He is a co-founder of Praxie and has been recognized by the Thinkers50 as one of the world’s top thought leaders in strategy and innovation.
Best Practice: Innovation Phases & Gates
Best Practice: Innovation Culture
With the Innovation Command Center you also get 200+ best practice templates to customize your innovation process
Our platform gives you the best innovation management processes and templates, instantly out-of-the-box. We’ve integrated the best tools and templates from across disciplines like strategy, change management, operations and project management from our growing library of innovation best practices to create a powerful solution that’s both easy to customize and simple to use. Get going instantly or let us build a custom solution using a combination of your existing processes and ours.
More about the Innovation Command Center
More than Ideation—We Help Teams Test, Validate, and Scale their Innovations.
Most “idea management” software platforms focus on the very front end of the innovation process through providing ways to collect ideas either as open calls or through idea challenges. While this is valuable for feeding the funnel, most ideas are typically incremental. And once the top ideas are selected, individuals and teams are left to their own devices to test, validate, and scale their ideas. Few software platforms provide the support or structure around design thinking or lean startup type processes.
Praxie was designed from scratch by seasoned experts who know how to scale big ideas. Our tools and processes aren’t just valuable for incremental ideas, but also the bigger opportunities and disruptive innovations. By combining simple processes, tools, templates, and metrics dashboards, we give teams a jump start – it’s just like having an expert innovation consultant guiding the process.
Our innovation software platform is fully scalable. Create an end-to-end approach or select individual tools to support your innovation team or entire organization around almost any innovation process:
- Identify Customer Problems, Needs & Jobs to be Done
- Generate & Collect Ideas
- Prioritize and Select Ideas
- Test Assumptions
- Develop Opportunities
- Manage the Portfolio
- Track Metrics & Progress
Communicate Up, Down and Across—Effortlessly.
Few companies engage executives, teams, employees and partners in a truly collaborative model. Innovation managers often piecemeal together various communication, document management, and collaboration tools that create complexity and actually hinder innovation.
Praxie’s flexible Innovation Command Center software platform transforms your innovation process into a dynamic process that’s always on and available. With your plans, process, and progress metrics in a single place, Praxie allows you to assign and engage individuals and teams as owners of specific opportunities, metrics, and process steps to ensure accountability. We help you keep everyone up to speed and on board in ways that accelerate decision-making, action, and business results.