27 Tools to Accelerate your Corporate Innovation efforts

In an era of rapid technology change and business model disruption that will see more than 50% of today’s S&P500 find itself replaced in 10 years time, companies that learn the fastest, win.

There are countless tools we use with our corporate innovation clients to build fast, learn fast and measure fast in order to help them determine what will ‘wow’ customers enough to extend or generate new lines of revenue and remain a competitive force well into the future.

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Building and optimising prototypes

POP / Balsamiq (mobile app prototypes)

Instapage / Launchrock / Squarespace (web prototypes)

Problem and Solution interview templates

Tinkercad (3D render prototypes)

InVision (wireframing prototypes)

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Marketing and customer acquisition

Social Media Ads (Facebook/Google/Linkedin)

BuzzSumo / Google Alerts (social listening)

Buffer / Hootsuite (social media posting)

MeetEdgar (re-post evergreen content frequently on social)

Mailchimp / Campaign Monitor (email marketing)

LeadIQ (build email lists directly from Linkedini’s search function)

MixMax (send personalised emails from your email client to hundreds of people at a time — works great with LeadIQ)

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Analytics

Google Analytics

Kissmetrics (view who visits your site and which pages are resonating with them)

Optimizely (split test which version of your offer, copy or imagery performs better)

Hotjar / CrazyEgg (user flow observation)

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Project team management

Trello (online kanban boards)

Asana (team task management)

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Automation and outsourcing

Supahands (offshore virtual assistants for $4p/h)

Zapier (get apps to talk to eachother with APIs to make your life easy and speed up your build-measure-learn loop!)

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There are no silver bullets when it comes to innovation. No one methodology or approach will ever guarantee success, particularly if you’re exploring disruptive innovation which by nature is fraught with uncertainty and an experimentation that often appears more akin to chaos than structure, but by accelerating our corporate innovation efforts we can figure out what works for us, take many more bets in a shorter amount of time and start to generate some tangible results that we can then use to build a case for further product development and eventual commercialisation.

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