Since we started working on Kindling, our idea management and collaboration application, we’ve focused on keeping people engaged with the product. We’re proud that in Q4 of 2009 the engagement level among all people with access to Kindling reached 77%—engagement level being the percentage of all potential users with access to Kindling who have either voted on an idea, commented on an idea, or submitted a new idea. The strength of that number largely results from the fact that we focus on it. Our feature set reinforces engagement: from the zero-training approach to the application, through email digests, to idea Campaigns, and plenty more.
To that end, we’re excited to announce the our latest release of Kindling, featuring reputation.
As a technology company, we’ve been impressed with the work done by the Stack Overflow team, and many among us are participants in the community they’ve created. We’ve seen firsthand how a good reputation system can motivate people and have applied some of this thinking to an organization’s innovation community in Kindling. Kindling’s reputation score for each user is derived from the value of their activities within the system. It’s based on the entirety of their participation, where high-value activities are most rewarded—such as having ideas approved or volunteering to help realize an idea. We’re excited to see how reputation within Kindling will motivate members of our client’s organizations to increase their participation in their innovation program.
The other exciting new addition to Kindling in this version is around the process for deciding which ideas should be approved. Many of our clients have communicated the same need to us, namely, better support for decision-makers to communicate and track relevant information upon which to base their decisions. Kindling 1.8 supports this in two ways: 1) Moderators and Administrators of a given Kindling Room now have a private comment thread on each idea where they can discuss the idea amongst themselves (these discussions were of course happening before this enhancement, only outside of Kindling); and 2) in the new decision-makers view of an idea, these same users can set values, such as ROI and others, which will enable the team to compare ideas based on quantitative values. This provides a powerful new means to value ideas. With another approach to valuing ideas comes more-informed decision making.
We’ve also been working to give decision makers more functionality to round out rooms and campaigns. One of the key features we’ve added here is the ability to have assets associated with a Room or Campaign. This will be hugely useful for our clients that may have heavy requirements for an effort. For example, this could be a great place to store competitive analysis documents in a room around getting a leg up on the competition. Along with this we’ve also implemented a fresh view of a Room or Campaign which gives a really nice birds-eye view of the activity within it.
To round out this release, we’ve introduced a groundbreaking new interface to the idea view within Kindling which we’re particularly proud of. It provides the user with more information like view count and number of users watching the idea, all while keeping the interface clean and simple (which Kindling is all about).
This is a milestone release and one that we’re confident will help our clients take their innovation management to the next level. We can’t wait to hear thoughts from our customers – and if you have any, by all means, let us know!
If you’re not yet using Kindling, learn more at http://www.kindlingapp.com.
Dick Webster said:
Look like useful and powerful improvements. Thanks.
Feedback (4-5-2010):
1. Replace “submit” with “present” throughout. We all want caring, involved, thinking people “presenting” their IFIEs—”Ideas For Improved Effectiveness.” “Submit” is right up there on the dumb scale, close to “Make a Suggestion.”
2. Use key terms for the three possible choices for idea disposition: “Implemented. In Process or Being Developed. In the [ideas] Bank” (not “cancelled”). Objective is using members’ (NOT “employees,” another top-down, too often pejorative, word) ideas to build the organization’s knowledge management (KM) “TWAINS: treasury, warehouse, archive / assets, inventory, network, storehouse — choose the term(s) that fit your culture and use of Kindling.
3. Reply to my earlier inquiry re adding self-assessment capability to your ideas management capability. The “thinking > creativity > innovation > change > performance improvement” supply chain is well-served by these two resources working synergistically. We have the self-assessment content, needing only the software and marketing resources to make “UPAS™” widely available for everyone’s economic and social benefit. (UPAS™ = Universal Performance Assessment System™”). -end-