Responses to your idea may have been: You should read this article, it’s along the lines that you’re thinking, or We tried this at my last company, it was a disaster…here’s why or I’ve thought something similar, but in my view of this we should send all salespeople to the conference, not just the leaders.

Organizational innovation is a social process

Ideas are a conversation, both in reality and within Kindling. An idea, particularly in the context of an organization (think bosses, capital, deadlines, business cases, buy-in), evolves through interaction with others. At each interaction point along the way something is gained: a new perspective.

The idea of conversation is the organizing principle of our product

Enter Yammer. Yammer is an enterprise social network experiencing rapid adoption by organizations large and small. Yammer seeks to replace email as the main method of distribution of information within the enterprise, increasing transparency and the flow of information around the organization.

Events broadcast in Yammer are great opportunities for a conversation: a new hire, a new marketing campaign, a new customer, a new idea. Let the conversation begin.

We’re very happy to announce that Kindling is Yammer’s newest innovation partner

This relationship is great for both products / companies: for Yammer, the value of their product increases the more relevant, important content flows through. Integration with partners is a great strategy for acquiring more relevant content.

For Kindling, we want your ideas to be wherever your people are—in email, on their commute via their phone, and in their internal social network.

How our integration works (in a nutshell)

A Kindling Administrator turns on Yammer integration for their Account. This is an authenticated handshake using OAuth 2, and is safe and secure. Once integrated, ideas and Campaign announcements, the most important, conversation-starting events in our product, are pushed automatically to the main Yammer feed.

Moderation events on the idea, such as approval, are pushed into Yammer’s activity stream. These events might start a conversation in Yammer and will pull more people into the source system for the content, to vote or participate directly on the idea.

See Kindling + Yammer in action

If you happen to be at in Atlanta today, stop by Yammer on Tour and meet services specialist Bill or our CTO Garrett. They would love to discuss Kindling, our integration with Yammer and social innovation with you.

If you’re not in Atlanta, contact us, we’ll schedule a time to discuss and show you Kindling integrated with Yammer.

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(photo credit Marc Wathieu, flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcwathieu/2979581445/)

In addition to serving busy people, Kindling competes with a host of other systems vying for attention. This includes internal blogs, CMS systems, intranets and the undisputed king of attention: email.

We design Kindling with these constraints in mind and embrace the fact that our users are busy. We use this to drive not only which features we choose to build, but how we design those selected. We believe that an effective innovation management product must help users navigate the sea of content created by the community, else it just becomes another part of the problem.

Signal to Noise.

Imagine yourself a user of an innovation management product in an organization with 4,000 participants. A fair average is that each user has two ideas and six comments per quarter – that’s 32,000 units of content. If you were to log in to the system every few weeks, there may be a few thousand ideas and comments waiting for you! Of those, plenty are noise, but a few are gems. And without your input, they may never realize their full potential.

But of course, you’re super busy… you have a presentation tomorrow and are getting ready for a vacation. Oh, and you have to finish your team’s reviews.

Where to start? You could search, follow an interesting tag or you could just start reading the stream. But with each of these approaches, you’re relying on a bit of luck for finding a relevant idea. And luck doesn’t scale.

When someone signs into Kindling, they aren’t immediately confronted by hundreds of ideas and thousands of comments. Kindling presents them with exactly five ideas, selected to match to their interests. A Kindling user that only has five minutes? No problem, they can start with these ideas selected specifically for them and read through more recommendations, time permitting.

Recommended ideas delivered fresh daily

Well-designed Products Listen.

When designing Kindling’s recommendation engine, we looked to the market for inspiration. Typically, recommendation engines work their magic using a mix of data explicitly provided by the user, and information inferred by usage of the product. Below are examples of explicit and behavioral feeders to recommendation engines.

Explicit actions that drive recommendations:

• Telling Netflix that you liked Chinatown but didn’t especially like Adventures in Babysitting.
• Indicating to Amazon that you like Science Fiction but don’t enjoy Documentaries.
• Letting Hunch know that you like Kidrobot and skateboarding.
• When you finish reading an article about Silicon Valley in the iPad newsreader Zite, indicating that you liked the article, author, and the tag “startups”.

Implicit behaviors that drive recommendations:

• Which search results you click on in Google, the words you use in GMail and the content you post to Google+. Google of course, being masters of leveraging your implicit behaviors to inform a profile of you as a person.
• The traits and qualities of the people you interact with on OK Cupid and, as importantly, those you choose to not interact with. Every click in OK Cupid informs their understanding of you. They’re listening.
• What items you search for, visit and purchase on Amazon.
• The songs you listen to on Rdio, and the listening history of those in your network.

As demonstrated by Google, Amazon, OK Cupid and Rdio, truly thoughtful software listens. Hidden in a user’s interactions are clues. For Kindling, these clues are everywhere: a user that works at a bike company recently searched for the words “frame”, “weight” and “design”, they’ve turned down notifications for marketing-related ideas and have repeatedly shared ideas about frames with their coworkers. It’s pretty easy, if you pay attention, to see these patterns and insights.

This is exactly the approach we’ve taken with Kindling – we’ve built the recommendation engine to use any explicit data offered by the user (but remember our constraint – people are busy, so they’re usually too busy to tell Kindling about their likes and dislikes) and to pay attention to all of the user’s actions and behaviors. The combination of these allows us to draw a good picture of each user’s interests and use this knowledge to recommend relevant ideas.

Positive Feedback Loop.

Application designers often fall into the trap of assuming that because they want their user to tell them something or interact with data in some way, if they put a button on the UI, it will be clicked. But users only click buttons that help them; they have exactly no interest in helping the design or development team.

This law of product design led us to my favorite feature in Kindling – where the product informs the user exactly why a particular idea was recommended. This allows the user to quickly correct our assumptions – they may have searched for “marketing” for their boss, or perhaps they’ve changed roles and are no longer interested in “HR”. Now you might be thinking: why would a busy user spend five seconds to click this? Aren’t they too busy? Yes! But they trust Kindling’s recommendations and want to make them better. A five second investment in receiving better recommendations in the future. Their goal, not ours.

Honesty is the best policy

Kindling’s recommendation engine is one example of a feature born out of understanding users’ constraints and being thoughtful about product design. If you’d like to learn more about this feature or the rest of Kindling, contact us for a tour of the product.

Posts

With Kindling’s new Posts feature, innovation program managers can communicate with internal and external community members directly in Kindling. No more summary emails, posts in an internal blog or links to files on the t:/ drive. Now every Kindling user can be a curatorial editor. Inspirational concepts can be added to Kindling with direct links to ideas, or posted as fodder for future ideation.

Ways to use Posts to inspire and stay in touch with community members:

• Update the performance of the innovation program by calling out particular ideas or participants, or announcing a winner of a recent Campaign.
• Motivate members to participate, perhaps by linking to a great article or TED talk.
• Link to competitor’s new product or service announcement.
• Share industry information and new market opportunities.
• Link to examples of your product being used by customers: Flickr photos and Vimeo videos are great places to look.

List view of Posts

View of a single Post

Video

While we were implementing the new Posts feature, we realized how important video was for communicating with innovation program participants. Kindling has supported embedded video with custom syntax for a while now, but the need for Posts gave us the opportunity to clean-up formatting and rich text editing for Posts, Ideas and Comments. We now support the ability to embed video from directly YouTube or Vimeo with 3 clicks.

Embed video inline in Ideas, Comments and Posts

Formatting an Idea Description

If you’d like to take a tour through the application, contact us today, we’d love the opportunity to show you the best innovation platform on the market – Kindling.

Assessments

A common refrain regarding Kindling, and one our competitors have tried to use against us over the last year, is that Kindling excels at engaging participants of an innovation program but lacks the feature set to help decision makers evaluate this flood of ideas. Throughout this year, we’ve increasingly focused on this area of the product and are pleased to announce a powerful new addition: decision makers in Kindling can now build and reuse custom templates which can gather expert feedback on an idea. This feedback is then collated into a super-slick summary report which can be printed, shared and used as another input to the idea evaluation and decision making process. Here are a few views of this feature in action:

Easily construct a form for expert feedback

Expert responses on the summary view

Anonymous Idea Submission

You’ve been asking for it, we’ve been resisting. We have to admit that anonymity has been a thorn in our sides since launching Kindling. We’ve spent countless hours convincing sales prospects and customers that they really don’t want anonymous contributions to their innovation community, as anonymity quickly devolves into a low level of discourse (see: the Internet!). And then we got it—there is a case where a participant wants to get honest feedback on their idea, unencumbered by their identity and reputation within the organization (“the boss’ idea…I love it!”). So this is what we’ve built. When this feature is turned on (in your admin settings), individuals can post ideas anonymously and reveal their identity at any point in the future. (We maintain our resistance to anonymous commentary, though.)

Some ideas benefit from anonymity

Idea author can reveal their identity

Matchstick

You’re at your computer reading an article on the Web when it happens—you get a flash of insight about your industry, a competitor or trend. Now, rather than navigating over to Kindling, you can use Matchstick, our browser-based idea capture tool. With Matchstick, participants in your community can draft their idea and relate it to the page they’re reading without ever leaving the Web page. We’re obsessed with lowering the friction between the time inspiration hits and the posting of the idea, and with Matchstick, we’ve reduced that friction even further. (And of course, when inspiration strikes on the go, there’s an app for that.) Matchstick is easily installed by visiting the Tools section of your Kindling account, there you’ll find easy instructions for installing in any browser.

Easily install Matchstick to any browser

Adding an idea is only ever one click away

This version is full of other goodies, too, including enhancements to our already incredibly user-friendly user interface that we can’t wait for you to see. If you are one of our current customers, login to your Kindling account now to see these new features in action.

And if you’re contemplating an innovation management solution, get in touch with us. We’d love to walk you through these features and show you how companies like yours are cutting costs, inventing new products and services and improving their bottom lines with Kindling.

How do we get more of THIS?

As a result of all this activity, we find ourselves squeezing important decisions into 30 minute meetings. Unable to bear entire days spent in conference rooms, we cheat and schedule quick half hours. But this is not working.

As proof, a 60-minute brainstorm last week on a proposed design for the new Kindling. After spending several weeks picking at it when we had five minutes here, twenty minutes there, we got in a room and projected the design on the wall. With the luxury of 60 full minutes, we allowed ourselves to circle the design and some fundamental issues for the first half. And then, incredibly, the knot came undone when we passed the 30 minute mark. Sufficiently warmed up, great ideas were flying until finally, exhausted, we leaned back in our chairs to admire our work.

It was so good.

This theme, that of allowing time to push past pleasantries during a brainstorm, continues to appear on a daily basis. The easy part is identifying the solution: dedicating more time to the creating process. The hard part comes in finding and making the time to do so.

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 things are equal, how do leaders emerge?

Try volunteering. When ideas are approved in Kindling, they move to a section called “Brilliance in Action.” Decision-makers can either immediately assign the idea to an employee or leave it open to volunteers. The “I’ll do it!” button appears for unassigned ideas, providing the opportunity for officemates to demonstrate their ambition and willingness to pitch in.

Those who volunteer to make an idea happen show initiative and interest in going above and beyond their daily responsibilities. Promoting the volunteer functionality within Kindling could help identify your next crop of leaders… not to mention get ideas moving towards completion!

I suppose once Julia Roberts plays you in a film, some are less inclined to take you seriously.

That's where your idea came from... and where it could return to if you don't do something with it. (via Mike Cattell)

Regardless, Gilbert is a very bright woman, talented writer and enthralling speaker. I had the opportunity to hear her speak at the New York Public Library several months ago and she shared her take on where ideas come from. Sit tight: it’s a little looney.

As she highlights in her TED talk, Gilbert believes that ideas are flashes of inspiration that visit us somewhat randomly. Our job, as thinkers (or artists), is to keep showing up to receive said flashes… and when inspiration strikes us in a traffic jam or when we’re plain old busy, the ideas seek another (less busy) home. Sound a little strange?

She went on to provide supporting evidence in the form of a recent situation between Gilbert and her friend, fiction writer, Ann Patchett.

Before she wrote Committed, Gilbert said she was writing a novel based on a middle-aged woman in love with her boss in Minnesota who was working in the Amazon on some sort of medical research. Gilbert had to put aside this novel, as various life obstacles got in her way. She switched gears and wrote Committed. A year or so later, she’s having coffee with Patchett and begs her friend to share the details of her new novel. To both their surprise, Patchett relates a novel with eerily similar details: middle-aged Minnesotan, researching in the Amazon, in love with her older boss.

Amazing! And a perfect confirmation that ideas, when you are not ready for them, seek out new owners.

Patchett’s latest novel, State of Wonder, is this exact book. I heard her give a reading last month and asked for her point of view on the story Gilbert had told. Patchett, the more logical of the two, said that she couldn’t necessarily agree that the ideas were seeking owners, but admitted that it had been very strange indeed.

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 is a secret sauce and we don’t want to let that cat out of the bag!

Unsure where to find your reputation? It’s listed next to your name in Kindling’s header and on your profile. Viewing another user’s profile or checking the latest standings on the Leaderboard can give you a good sense of where you fit among the rest of your company. Are you on the low end? Sounds like it’s time to add some fresh ideas to the mix!

No one likes a conglomerate product. (via njorthr)

This isn’t a problem for Kindling, the product, but it occurred to me this morning that this is a problem for me, the product manager.

After a great meeting reviewing our next six months with a colleague, I came back to my desk and thought “wow, what’s going to be next?” I allowed myself to imagine a bit into the future and then I slammed the door on that. “The LAST thing we need are more ideas!” I thought. Because to me, the person who serves as the traffic cop, ideas for Kindling overwhelm me on an everyday basis!

I bet a lot of people managing products feel similarly out there. There can be so many dreamers for your product that you spend your time giving priority to other people’s visions and put yours by the wayside.

On one hand, you need this role on every team, just like you need someone in every family who can put the brakes on spending every last dime in the savings account.  Someone has to protect the long-term future of the project (be it family or product) while the rest of the crew bubbles with innovation.

But on the other hand, I think the exercise of dreaming big, giant dreams for a product is necessary for short- and long-term motivation. Regardless of your role, you can give yourself five minutes to ignore the endless line of requests and imagine the next generation of what you’re building. More than anything, you must remember that your product is more than a globby mess of features requested from the highest bidder.

So ignore requests for pagination and a fancier button. Think bigger. Who is your product in the world? Who loves it? Who needs it? And what will their love and needs require two, three, five years from now?

Those are the ideas that thrive in Kindling, the ideas that invite discussion and create voting frenzies. The big ideas. The ones that need you to think of them early on, that require a little time in your schedule to dream them up.

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 supreme and remains the undisputed champion of idea management. This is natural and expected. Even if this poll has a margin of error of 10%, that means that somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of all organizations use email to “manage” idea submissions from employees.

Email remains the lifeblood of organizations, the place where all strategic topics and tactical items are discussed, up and down the organizational ranks. There’s no reason to assume that innovation-related conversations have escaped the clutches of email as discussion platform.

We see this firsthand, as many of the organizations using Kindling sought a dedicated solution after outgrowing an email-based approach to sharing ideas. Ultimately, email becomes insufficient to fully empower an innovation community—it’s too closed, too noisy and doesn’t allow for collaboration easily.

“Actually, We Don’t Want Your Ideas”

The surprise in the poll was the frequency of the response, “We don’t solicit ideas from staff.”  A full 25%! That means somewhere around 1/4 of organizations are not actively seeking input from their staff on how to cut costs, improve the running of the business, or articulate ideas born out of customer interactions. (Which many employees will interpret as disinterest in their ideas altogether.)

The latent, untapped power in those non-existent conversations is staggering. As our customers know, those unspoken ideas can literally transform businesses and redefine industries.

The Opportunity

We believe it will soon be unimaginable for an organization to employ a talented workforce and *not* create a space for them to submit, discuss, debate, and collaborate on ideas. We see a near future where, on your first day at a new job, you’re shown your desk, given a bathroom key, access to your email, and the location of the idea management workspace. We’re ready.