Every IT leader evaluating innovation management software eventually confronts the same question: do we build a custom solution on our existing infrastructure, or buy a purpose-built platform? The conventional framing presents these as the only two options—custom development versus commercial software. But that framing misses a third path that resolves the core tradeoffs both options create.
Understanding why the traditional build-vs-buy framework fails for innovation management specifically requires examining what each option actually costs, what each delivers, and where a productized platform built on your existing infrastructure eliminates the compromises both approaches demand.
What Are the Real Costs of Building Custom Innovation Software on SharePoint?
SharePoint is the most common starting point for custom-built innovation management, and for good reason. Most enterprises already license it, IT teams know how to manage it, and its list and library architecture can model basic innovation workflows. Critics are right that raw SharePoint has real limitations for innovation management—it lacks built-in stage-gate workflows, AI-powered analysis, portfolio scoring, and the structured evaluation processes that innovation teams need.
The development path typically follows a predictable pattern. First, an internal team builds custom lists and libraries to track ideas and projects. Then they add Power Automate flows for approvals and notifications. Then custom views and dashboards for portfolio visibility. Then document management workflows for stage-gate reviews. Each addition works, but the cumulative maintenance burden grows with every customization.
After 12 to 18 months, the organization has invested 800 to 2,000 development hours in a system that handles basic project tracking but still lacks the AI capabilities, structured evaluation frameworks, and cross-portfolio analysis that differentiate innovation management from project management. And every feature addition requires more development time from a team that has other priorities.
The hidden cost: Custom SharePoint solutions create technical debt that compounds. When Microsoft updates SharePoint (which happens continuously), custom solutions require testing and potentially rework. When the developer who built the system leaves, institutional knowledge goes with them. When the organization wants to add AI capabilities, there's no clean integration path because the custom architecture wasn't designed for it.
What Are the Real Costs of Buying Standalone SaaS Innovation Software?
Commercial innovation management platforms—ITONICS, Brightidea, IdeaScale, Qmarkets, and others—offer purpose-built functionality that custom SharePoint solutions can't match. They provide structured stage-gate workflows, portfolio analytics, idea scoring, and increasingly, AI-powered features. For innovation-specific functionality, they're superior to anything a small IT team could build internally.
But they introduce a different set of costs that are easy to underestimate during evaluation.
Data residency and security: Every SaaS platform operates its own cloud infrastructure. Your innovation data—unpatented ideas, competitive strategies, formulation research, market analysis—lives in the vendor's environment, governed by their security practices. For regulated industries, this triggers compliance review cycles that can add months to procurement. For IT teams already managing Copilot governance concerns (Gartner reports 40% of enterprises delayed Copilot specifically due to data access issues), adding another external AI system accessing sensitive innovation data amplifies rather than simplifies the security landscape.
Integration overhead: SaaS platforms that advertise "Microsoft 365 integration" typically mean they can push notifications to Teams or sync files with OneDrive. This isn't integration—it's data bridging. True integration means operating within the same authentication system, the same permission model, the same compliance framework, and the same data governance policies. Bolt-on integrations create the exact tool-sprawl problem they claim to solve.
Per-user pricing economics: Most SaaS innovation platforms charge per user per month. In an organization where innovation touches 50 to 200 people across R&D, marketing, operations, and leadership, per-user pricing scales in ways that strain mid-market budgets. The alternative—restricting licenses to a small team—undermines the collaborative benefit that makes innovation management software valuable in the first place.
What Is the Third Option That Most IT Leaders Miss?
A productized platform built natively on infrastructure you already own combines the best attributes of both approaches while eliminating their primary weaknesses.
"Native" in this context means the platform runs entirely within your Microsoft 365 tenant—on your SharePoint, in your Teams, governed by your security policies. It's not a custom-built collection of lists and workflows, and it's not an external SaaS tool with a Teams connector. It's a productized application with purpose-built innovation management functionality that happens to run on the M365 infrastructure your organization already licenses and manages.
This distinction matters operationally in several concrete ways.
Security and compliance: Because the platform operates within your tenant, your existing Conditional Access policies, sensitivity labels, Data Loss Prevention rules, and audit logging apply automatically. There's no separate security perimeter to manage. When your IT team configures Copilot governance controls—which Microsoft's deployment blueprint now addresses in detail—those same controls govern the innovation platform's AI capabilities. One security framework, consistently applied.
Zero infrastructure investment: The platform deploys on infrastructure you already pay for and maintain. No new cloud subscriptions, no data migration to an external vendor, no additional SSO configuration. For mid-market companies where Fortune Business Insights confirms implementation costs remain "prohibitively high," this eliminates the largest cost barrier entirely.
Productized functionality: Unlike custom SharePoint builds, a native platform includes purpose-built stage-gate workflows, AI-powered analysis, portfolio scoring, evaluation frameworks, and innovation-specific reporting. These features are maintained and updated by the platform vendor, not by your internal development team. The technical debt that sinks custom solutions doesn't accumulate because the platform vendor handles feature development and M365 compatibility.
How Should IT Leaders Evaluate These Three Options?
A structured evaluation framework should assess five dimensions across all three approaches.
Total cost of ownership over 3 years: Include not just licensing but integration maintenance, security audit costs, developer time for customization, and the opportunity cost of IT resources diverted to innovation tool management. Custom SharePoint solutions look cheap until you account for 800+ development hours. SaaS platforms look reasonable until you multiply per-user fees across your organization for 36 months. Native platforms should be evaluated against the marginal cost above your existing M365 licensing.
Time to operational value: How long from contract signature to the first meaningful innovation workflow running in production? Custom builds typically require 6 to 12 months. SaaS implementations range from 60 to 90 days for basic deployment to 6 months for full integration. Native platforms deploying on existing M365 infrastructure can reach operational status in 30 days because the security, authentication, and collaboration infrastructure is already in place.
AI capability and data access: Can the solution's AI capabilities access the full context of your innovation data without manual data transfer or integration middleware? Custom solutions rarely include AI. SaaS platforms offer AI but within their own data silo. Native platforms provide AI analysis across your innovation data within the same environment where that data lives—no extraction, no transfer, no additional security review.
Security architecture alignment: Does the solution operate within your existing security framework, or does it create an additional perimeter? For organizations navigating Copilot governance, this question is particularly relevant. A native platform inherits your governance controls. A SaaS platform requires its own governance layer.
Maintenance burden on IT: Who maintains the solution as both the platform and the underlying infrastructure evolve? Custom solutions create permanent maintenance obligations for your team. SaaS solutions minimize platform maintenance but require ongoing integration management. Native solutions are maintained by the vendor but operate within your managed infrastructure—the vendor handles innovation features while your team manages the M365 environment they already maintain.
What Questions Should You Ask Vendors?
When evaluating innovation management platforms, these five questions reveal whether a vendor is truly M365-native or merely M365-compatible.
Where does our innovation data physically reside? If the answer isn't "in your Microsoft 365 tenant, period," the solution isn't native—it's a SaaS tool with a Teams connector.
Which Microsoft security controls automatically apply to the platform? A native solution should inherit Conditional Access, sensitivity labels, DLP policies, and audit logging without additional configuration. If security requires separate setup, the integration is surface-level.
What happens to our data if we stop using your platform? With a native solution, your data remains in your SharePoint tenant exactly where it was. With SaaS, you need an export process and a plan for data portability.
How do AI features access our data? Native AI operates within your tenant's data boundaries. External AI requires data transfer to the vendor's processing environment—a significant consideration for unpatented innovation IP.
What does deployment require from our IT team? If the answer involves new infrastructure provisioning, data migration, or custom SSO configuration, the "simplicity" is marketing language, not architectural reality.
The build-vs-buy framework made sense when those were the only options. For organizations already invested in Microsoft 365, there's a third path that delivers the functionality of purpose-built software, the security of internal infrastructure, and the AI capabilities that neither custom builds nor most SaaS platforms can match. The evaluation shouldn't be which compromise to accept—it should be which option eliminates the need to compromise.