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The Innovation Command Center – upBOARD’s Online Software Platform Delivers the Latest Innovation Management Best Practices and Processes from the Cloud.

Creating your opportunity portfolio. Developing your business case. Tracking products and services through the stage gate process. Engaging internal teams and external partners in the innovation process. Innovation management requires a structured yet flexible approach.

Whether you’re running an innovation department, R&D lab, or HR department focused on creating a culture of innovation, upBOARD’s Innovation Management Software Platform gives you a scalable solution for driving innovation.

Strategic Plans, Innovation Processes & Metrics Dashboards All in One Place.

Unlike traditional innovation software tools, upBOARD’s Innovation Command Center provides best practice tools, templates, and dashboards that instantly jump start your innovation process – by giving you the plans, processes, and progress dashboards that keep you on track.

Our work has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Inc. Magazine and other leading media. And our software reflects our expertise – by integrating the world’s leading-edge processes, tools, and metrics dashboards from the latest business strategy and innovation best practices.

Never Start from Scratch Again. Get Going Instantly with Innovation Best Practices from the World’s Leading Experts.

Our platform gives you the best of the best innovation management tools and processes, instantly out-of-the-box. We’ve integrated the best principles and practices from the latest innovation trends and global experts, from managing product portfolios to creating a culture of innovation, including:

Agile Innovation Process

Agile Innovation Process is a team-based methodology for constantly adapting to changing business circumstances and conditions. The overarching goal of agile innovation is to develop a product or service that changes the market, forcing competitors to adapt or exit as a market player. In order to accomplish this goal, agile innovation processes involve splitting up larger projects into simpler, more manageable tasks and continuously reassessing the strategies for completing them.Learn More »

Business Case Development

A Business Case clearly outlines the fundamental reason for why an organization should engage in a particular project or task. They can either be formally or informally presented to top-level management or other relevant stakeholders. Generally, the team creating the business case for a project or task should aim to argue that whatever resources (e.g., money, time, talent, etc.) need to be expended for a project are being requested in order to fulfill a business necessity.Learn More »

Business Model Canvas

The Business Model Canvas is a template for developing a new business model or clarifying the elements of an existing business model. It is a “canvas” or chart that describes a firm’s value proposition, infrastructure, partnerships, value proposition, customers, finances and other strategic and operational dimensions of the business.Learn More »

Concept Development

Concept Development is the starting point for a business idea. It includes the type of service or product, the target customer demographic, and describes what is unique about it that will give this idea a competitive advantage. The process of Concept Development results in a portfolio of business concepts that can be prioritized and then used to develop a business plan.Learn More »

Concept Screening

Concept Screening is a process that an organization can use to narrow down the number of ideas that are commonly generated for a new product or service. In order to ensure that the strongest ideas are selected for further development, they need to be screened against certain criteria.Learn More »

Concept Testing

Concept Testing is the process of using surveys, interviews, or other means to test consumer acceptance of a new product idea prior to introducing a new product to the market.Learn More »

Customer Empathy Map

A Customer Empathy Map is a strategic tool that is used to develop a thorough understanding of the customer or client who will be using a new product or service. More specifically, an empathy map forces individuals who are part of innovation or marketing teams to consider customer attitudes towards the product or service and their behavioral response to it.Learn More »

Customer Problem Statements

A Customer Problem Statement is a detailed description of an issue that needs to be addressed by a problem-solving team. It is written to focus the team at the beginning, keep the team on track during the innovation project, and to confirm that the team delivered an appropriate solution that addresses a real customer need at the end of the project.Learn More »

Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving used to create new and innovative ideas for business. Design Thinking includes a mindset focused on discovering people’s problems and challenges, and then using those to develop practical solutions to address them.Learn More »

Innovation Funnel Management Process

An Innovation Funnel Management Process is the approach used to narrow down ideas for an innovation process or project into a feasible and realistic plan of action. The general process of the innovation funnel consists of generating a large number of possible ideas, a handful of which are then fine-tuned and converted into formal development plans, thus creating a “funnel shape.”Learn More »

Innovation Horizons Model

The Innovation Horizons Model, also called the three horizons model, is a framework that organizations can use to identify areas for innovation and improvement without losing sight of current performance. This model is useful for driving innovation while preventing the types of organizational stagnation seen in many mature companies.Learn More »

Innovation Roadmap

An Innovation Roadmap is a visual depiction of the steps to be taken to achieve a strategic goal driven by innovation. As a strategic tool, an Innovation Roadmap lays out the specific actions that should be implemented over time to create new products, services, or business models.Learn More »

Jobs to be Done

Jobs to be Done is best described as a perspective through which new product ideas can be evaluated for usefulness and viability. Understanding your customers’ Jobs to be Done helps determine what specific needs, pain points, or problems to focus on during the innovation process.Learn More »

Lean Startup

Lean Startup is a methodology for developing new businesses and products with the goal of shortening product development cycles with frequent use of prospective customer contact, learning, and iteration. The Lean Start-up approach is most often used by early-stage startups, but more and more corporate ventures and innovation teams use the approach, tools, and templates to test and validate new business concepts.Learn More »

Listening Hats

Listening Hats (also known as Six Thinking Hats) is a strategic tool that can be used while generating ideas for a new product or service. This tool is especially useful because it forces the individuals on the innovation team to consider options from a completely different perspective from which they normally would. Additionally, in a group setting, the Listening Hats tool allows every member of the team to view each option from many different perspectives at the same time.Learn More »

Open Innovation Process

An Open Innovation Process emphasizes the use of external ideas and approaches to create and market new products and forces your innovation team to deliberately gather external insight from suppliers, partners, distributors, think tanks, and other external sources of information and technology. The method differs from those that came before, because it recognizes that the boundaries between the organization and others within the industry are more flexible, which, if used properly, create more impactful products or services.Learn More »

Painstorming

Painstorming is a method that is used to discover the real factors that underlie new opportunities for an organization. More specifically, Painstorming is a more targeted form of brainstorming that allows the innovation team to critically think about the ails or problems facing an industry, the business climate, the client base, or a particular product or service.Learn More »

Rapid Prototyping

Rapid Prototyping is a process for quickly creating mock-ups, models, or renderings of a product, service, process, or business model.Learn More »

SCAMPER

SCAMPER is an acronym that is used to help prompt creative ideas for improving existing products or services or creating new innovations. The letters in SCAMPER stand for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and reverse. Each letter is associated with a string of questions that can be asked about existing products to discover methods of improvement or entirely new opportunities.Learn More »

S-Curve Mapping

S-Curve Mapping is the process used to identify the different phases of evolution of a product, services, business process to identify innovation opportunities to competitive advantage. S-curve maps plot product or industry performance along the axes of time and performance. The model can be used to determine how mature and established an organization is within the industry or how well-developed the industry is itself.Learn More »

Phases and Gates Innovation Pipeline Management

The Phases and Gates Process is an innovation management process in which a new initiative is divided into specific phases separated by “gates'” that represent decision points across the product development process.Learn More »

Startup Innovation Management

Startup Innovation Management is a systematic process used by established companies to identify and work with startups, usually as part of a broader “open innovation” strategy.Learn More »

Technology Life Cycle Model

The Technology Life Cycle Model shows the journey a technology takes, from birth to eventual death and the stages in between. Understanding the Technology Life Cycle helps companies predict when they will be able to recover the investment they put into development, and when to plan for new projects.Learn More »

Technology Scouting

Technology Scouting is a strategic process that serves to accomplish three goals: (1) identifying new technologies, (2) acquiring information about new technologies for the organization and (3) acquiring these new technologies for the organization.Learn More »

Teece’s Win-Lose Innovation Model

Teece’s Win-Lose Innovation Model describes the steps that organizations can take to ensure that they actually profit from their innovative products and services before competition replicates the product and pulls ahead in bottom-line performance. This model focuses on how an organization can obtain the proper legal protection to prevent this scenario from occurring.Learn More »

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.

upBOARD 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.

upBOARD’s flexible Innovation Command Center software platform transforms your innovation process into a living “board” that’s always on and available for everyone to use and see. With your plans, process, and progress metrics in a single place, upBOARD 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.

Drive innovation with best practices, tools & templates from upBOARD!

digital best practice tools & templates
Help your team quiet the chaos and focus on what really matters.