There is one universal truth we’ve uncovered while working with customers over the last four years: everyone is busy. Toy companies, federal agencies and financial services firms; CEOs, Product Managers, new hires; salespeople in the field and marketing staff in the home office. Everyone is busy. In addition to serving busy people, Kindling competes with [...]
Author Archive
The Design of Kindling: Recommending Relevant Ideas
New from Kindling: Better communication with the participants of your innovation program
Over the last 4 years we’ve witnessed how innovation and inspiration go hand-in-hand. A competitor launching a PR campaign triggers an idea about product positioning. A video of a user-testing session restructures a key product feature. A quote from a renewing customer inspires a key lead-gen system. Historically these ideas were emailed around the organization [...]
Big new features from Kindling
As with all product companies, we regularly hear feedback from our current and prospective customers about the product. Over time, patterns sometimes emerge and a universal need is revealed. We’ve been lucky enough over the last few months to see some common needs arise among our customers, and we’re very excited to announce a new [...]
The Untapped Power of Non-Existent Conversations
This week, ReadWriteWeb asked their readers via an online poll, “How does your company manage ideas?” Despite many problems with the poll (the sample was RWW readers only, there’s no data about respondents, nor any indication how many participated), we found two key insights in the results. The Undisputed, Clumsy King As expected, email reigns [...]
Announcing Kindling International
We’ve been surprised by a number of things since we starting offering Kindling over three years ago. Perhaps the biggest surprise to us, though, was the amount of interest we’d receive from outside the US. From very early on we’ve received requests and emails from organizations around the world – and not just large multi-nationals. [...]
Kindling Recommended Ideas Covered by ReadWriteWeb
Following on his recent article, Three Trends in Idea Management, Klint Finley of ReadWriteWeb Enterprise covered our launch today of Recommended Ideas. I demoed the newest Kindling version for Klint last week, and he zeroed-in on the features that help users cut through the information overload problem, specifically our “highly configurable e-mail notification system” and [...]
Kindling’s Latest Updates are a Leap Forward for Idea Management
Members of the Kindling product team have had hundreds of conversations this year with people about innovation and idea management and software solutions. These conversations have spanned organizational size, industry and region. Across these varied conversations one topic has been consistent throughout – people are so busy and have so much work to do that [...]
Design with Empathy
We do a lot of talking and writing about design at Kindling’s parent company, Arc90. It’s the reason we’re in business and what we love to do – we bring a design mentality to all of our work, be that side projects, client consulting work or our products. In this post I’ll avoid the deep [...]
Part II: What Makes an Idea Good?
The most interesting part of most Kindling product conversations is often the discussion around idea moderation, specifically how decision-makers of an organization can find the best ideas. This, of course, touches on the question of the day: what makes an idea good? Kindling features a voting system, and other competing products feature similar schemes for [...]
Ziff Davis Survey on Enterprise Collaboration
Guy Currier, Executive Director of Research at Ziff Davis Enterprise, recently conducted a survey of innovation, knowledge sharing technologies and collaboration. The survey featured responses from 342 individuals from qualifying firms, including Mark Tellegen from Kindling client LeapFrog: LeapFrog, an educational toy company based in Emeryville, Calif., has used Arc90’s Kindling idea management tool since [...]