Blogging Innovation blog has a great list of tools to manage innovation and ideas.  Tools to manage ideation are important and the author has put in quite a bit of work to generate a pretty comprehensive list.  Please also check out his word document on desired functionality.

In my experience, idea management tools are a subset of processes, tools and metrics needed to ensure that innovation pays off.  Managers need to find ways to quickly evaluate, develop and monitor innovative ideas.  There also needs to be an efficient approach to kill innovation projects that do not pan out.

One of the companies I worked at had a great innovation generation machine.  They gave out $20-50k for small projects that looked outlandish enough.  However, there existed no way to catch all this innovation and develop it further into delivered products.

What is your experience?  How is innovation management working in your organization.