Idea management systems are increasingly widespread in organizations. With their deployment, firms get aware that existing systems have various shortcomings. By analysing idea management systems in three German service firms, we find that a low degree of interaction and knowledge exchange lead to a high workload particular for idea developers and submission of too many ideas. In addition, these ideas are of low maturity and submitted multiple times. To overcome these shortcomings our analysis reveals that firms need an interactive innovation management system that supports multidisciplinarity and team collaboration and includes different social software applications