3 tools to leverage your innovation results during home-office times

Current COVID-19 measures and the implied home-office restrictions all over Germany had businesses realize yet again how crucial a company’s digital infrastructure is in order to keep innovation efforts (and not only innovation processes) up and running.

Digitalization - often dismissed as the 20th century hype or buzzword, is now in full effect and innovation managers, customer researchers and design experts are looking to create a digital infrastructure that lets their team communicate efficiently, work on concepts and share files collaboratively.

In order to make this easier for you we’ve put together a selection of three tools, that will help you master your innovation processes from start to finish within a distributed team.

Let’s jump right in!

MURAL - A digital workspace for virtual collaboration

Whilst a face-to-face workshop can never be the same experience, MURAL made it possible to replicate a similar experience online. Especially methods such as Design Thinking require a lot of visual thinking to share and clarify ideas - think: sticky notes, whiteboards, flipcharts, etc. For this purpose MURAL acts as a digital whiteboard on which users can use virtual sticky notes as well as add images, videos, arrows, labels, and text.

This virtual whiteboard let’s you and your remote team keep the momentum of current design sprints, ideation workshops, etc. up and running. We like to use it a lot - before storing the results in our BlitzMinds’ innovation database.

SPRINTBASE - Remote Design Thinking

Instead of focusing on digitizing post-its, Sprintbase puts a strong emphasis on method guidance. Sprintbase helps remote teams apply design thinking, embed innovation skills, and get results. The methods and tools help teams tackle their creative problems, learn to collaborate successfully, and save time & money in the process.

We believe it’s a great tool for everyone, who likes to follow predefined innovation methods and group their results on a digital board. However, for teams who need a high degree of flexibility in terms of innovation methods, there are even more flexible solutions out there.

CONFULENCE - Organize, Discuss, Collaborate

Whilst Confluence isn’t an innovation-tool per definition, we think it can be powerful, as it’s use cases are nearly endless. It helps teams organize, discuss and collaborate on their work. The available apps make it adjustable to many kinds of different needs. A great advantage is the integration with Jira for task management. Nevertheless there is a disadvantage to allround solutions, they are allrounders. The full power of confluence is immense but cannot easily be used.

Also worth mentioning: You can create cards in Jira from your results in our solution - InsideUX® as well! That way you’re utilizing the full benefit in the innovation phase AND the development phase!