Think back to the last time you had an idea for something relating to your product or service–what was your first instinct? You likely ran the idea past a few interested people to get their perspective and start to build support. Responses to your idea may have been: You should read this article, it’s along the [...]
The Kindling Blog
Best practices, how-tos and lessons in innovation.
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The Design of Kindling: Recommending Relevant Ideas
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 [...]
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 [...]
Why brainstorms need at least 60 minutes.
We’re in the middle of a redesign for Kindling. It kicked off several months ago, motivated by some significant new features we’ll be rolling out later this year, and with the redesign comes a frenzy of activity. There are implications for sales, direction and (obviously) the team of developers and designers who embrace the vision [...]
Creating a culture of leaders
As a democratic application, Kindling is well-versed in providing an even playing field. Every user, from the intern to the CEO, has the same amount of votes to spend. In this way, Kindling believes that anyone can have a good idea – and that no one gets more influence than anyone else. So if all [...]
Use it or lose it: the nomadic idea.
Lately it seems like Elizabeth Gilbert is most recognized as the woman who gave a brilliant TED talk on genius and the role of the muse in an artist’s life. Unless, of course, you refer to her as “the woman who wrote Eat, Pray, Love.” Then you get a totally different look of understanding, typically [...]
How is Kindling reputation calculated?
Who wants to know?! Seriously though, users gain reputation by interacting with Kindling. Your reputation score is a reflection of your activity in the system. High-value activities are most rewarded, including: submitting ideas commenting on ideas volunteering for ideas having an idea approved Other than that, we can’t tell you much more. Our reputation algorithm [...]
Why you shouldn’t stop innovation when faced with THE BUSY
As Product Manager on Kindling, I spend much of my week fielding feature requests and keeping track of enhancements we want to make to to the product. There are no shortage of these. Between customer feedback (thanks, by the way!) keeping an eye on our competition and exploring relationships with design partners, we could ride [...]
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 [...]