Innovation Through Collaboration

Zero Training.

You shouldn’t have to bring in consultants to train your employees on your idea collaboration tool. Kindling’s intuitive design allows participants to submit ideas, collaborate with others and innovate without training.

Innovation Channel.

Once Kindling is launched within your organization, it quickly becomes the central location for discussions and collaboration around innovation.

Maximize Engagement Levels.

Kindling’s design drives employee engagement. Across all Kindling customers, the participation level is above 77%, the best in the industry. Every employee that isn’t participating in your innovation program is a lost opportunity.

Don’t let your choice of solution stand in the way of employee participation!

Motivate Employees.

Kindling is designed to motivate members of your organization to participate in the innovation process.

Campaigns.

Kindling Campaigns are idea drives, or time-based calls for ideas on a particular topic. Campaigns motivate participants with optional rewards and the chance for recognition.

Reputation.

Kindling recognizes that many employees are motivated by the social dynamics existing in your organization. A participant’s Reputation in Kindling reflects the value created through their activities in the innovation process.

Posts.

Kindling has a built-in CMS, where participants can be turned into curatorial editors. Editors can communicate to innovation program participants directly in the product, as there’s nothing more motivating that an inspirational video or a link to a competitor’s product announcement!

Idea Evolution.

Kindling is designed with the philosophy that ideas mature through peer feedback and participation. Ideas are entered and then discussed and voted upon by the community, ensuring that the collective intelligence of your organization is reflected in the idea as it evolves.

Collaboration.

Kindling is designed to bring the members of your organization together around their ideas. Kindling supports collaboration around ideas indirectly, via the public commentary on an idea, and directly, through wiki-style editing of any idea. All proposed edits to an idea, however, are routed to the idea author for approval. Accepted edits are then reflected in the new version of the idea. Kindling is Innovation Through Collaboration.

Maximize Participation.

Kindling members participate in ideas in a number of ways. Members can comment, vote, co-author and volunteer for ideas. In order to maximize time spent in your innovation program, Kindling has the first solution to the information overload problem in Idea Management. With Kindling’s Recommended Ideas feature, a personalized list of relevant ideas are delivered to each participant, based on their skills, interests and activity within the platform.

Volunteering.

Kindling allows any member of your organization to volunteer to help implement an idea. People that are particularly interested in the implementation of an idea can raise their hand and let the decision-makers of the organization know that they’re available and willing to play a role in the idea’s successful implementation.

Voting.

All participants have a finite amount of votes per Room, which they use to indicate support for their favorite ideas. When you aggregate this decision-making across the organization, the most popular ideas rise to the top. Harness the wisdom from your community to help identify the best ideas.

Evaluate Ideas.

It’s not enough to just gather ideas – the goal is to find the ideas best suited for implementation in your environment.

Evaluation Criteria.

Organizations have a number of axes for which they evaluate ideas. Kindling allows decision-makers in your organization to configure Evaluation Criteria relevant for their process. These Criteria can then be set for all ideas in a Room and used, along with other metrics like idea popularity, as the basis for deciding which ideas advance towards implementation. Using the Evaluation Manager, decision-makers can compare ideas across all metrics – including idea popularity and their custom criteria, and use this as the basis for moderating ideas.

Assessments.

Often decision makers require structured feedback on ideas from experts to help evaluate an idea. With Kindling’s Assessments, decision makers can construct (or reuse) structured forms and assign tasks to experts. These responses are then collated into a super-slick summary report, which is printable, sharable and a useful input into the decision making process.

Approval Workflow.

Decision-makers can communicate with each other in a private collaboration space per Room, perfect for private conversations about the approval process. Additionally, decision-makers can set and track approval and implementation related information like ROI.

Moderation.

Kindling takes a flexible approach to administration – individual’s can be assigned as moderators per idea Room. By assigning relevant moderators per Room, those most capable of decision-making have the ability to approve and implement ideas. Once approved, all ideas are tracked through implementation right in Kindling.

Reporting and Data Access.

A successful innovation program is constantly being evaluated by the organization, and Kindling supports this fact. Reporting and Kindling’s API provides access to the data useful for evaluating the program: activity, ROI, Campaign effectiveness and participation.

Empower the decision-makers in your organization to drive outcomes using ROI tracking, email digests, Campaigns or simply by adding a reward. With Kindling it’s easy to see how the organization is responding to the innovation process.

Flexible Set-Up

Kindling is designed to work seamlessly in organizations large and small. Accounts can be configured for integration with LDAP and Active Directory for easy administration or operate as stand-alone via invited users. For both types of Accounts, Kindling now supports User Groups, which can either be inherited from your organization’s internal user management store, or constructed by Administrators in Kindling. Using Groups, assignment of a user’s permissions to Rooms becomes less time consuming.

Ideas Can Happen Anywhere.

We all know that the best ideas can happen in the most inopportune places. At the park or in a cab, with Kindling Mobile you’ll be able to get your ideas out before you’ve forgotten them.

Works On Any Smartphone.

If your phone can browse the Web, your phone can use Kindling Mobile. It’s as easy as pointing your mobile Web browser to your Kindling Account – from there you can easily catch up on recent activity, vote and comment on the latest ideas in your organization.

Localized Language Support.

Kindling is now available localized for Japanese, German and Spanish-speaking organizations. We’ve worked with professional translators to correctly capture the messaging and tone of the application. Kindling also supports local currency and date formatting.

Local Partners.

Kindling has established relationships with local partner reprentatives to provide foreign-based organizations with local sales, support and implementation services. Contact us and we’ll route you to the appropriate partner.

More Translations added Regularly.

Looking for Kindling in your language? We’re adding translations all the time – contact us and we’ll see what we can do!

Innovate in Microsoft Outlook.

The more integrated your selection of an idea management tool is into your business and infrastructure, the more effective the program.

For many members of your organization, a large percentage of their working day is spent in Outlook. Kindling’s Outlook plug-in brings the ideas directly where people are spending their time and leverages the email metaphor to further engage people. Experience Kindling integrated with Outlook with this design video, and look for the announcement shortly once the plug-in is officially launched.

Innovate in Microsoft SharePoint.

Every aspect of Kindling is designed to fit into your organization’s ecosystem seamlessly. If you’re using Microsoft Sharepoint to support your collaboration efforts, Kindling’s SharePoint integration will enable the members of your organization to innovate with ease.

With Kindling’s support for unified authentication using ActiveDirectory and Single Sign-On, your users can easily move from SharePoint to Kindling without reauthenticating. Kindling’s SharePoint integration features a customizable component (Web Part) to pull relevant views and lists of ideas directly into SharePoint.
With integrated federated search, members of your organization will be able to locate ideas while searching SharePoint – increasing the likelihood of engaging your participants in your innovation program.

Encryption

Kindling is secured via multiple layers – the first is industry standard SSL encryption to prevent your ideas from being viewed while in transit. We use industry standard 128-bit encryption or higher (the same standard used for online banking).

Physical Security

Kindling provides a totally separate database, complete with credentials, per account. This means that ideas can never be leaked across accounts. All Kindling data is backed-up nightly, on and off-site. Security and reliability are very important facets of the Kindling service.

Find Great Ideas.

With Kindling Open, tap into the power of your community to help drive your organization’s innovation efforts. Ideas and commentary are publicly available, and members of your community can self-register to participate. Internal staff can engage with the public and ultimately move ideas forward along a configurable workflow.

Highly Customizable.

Kindling Open’s content and appearance is fully customizable, because your open innovation solution should be an extension of your brand, not ours. From backgrounds to colors to the homepage to the FAQs to Terms & Conditions, Kindling Open is entirely under your control.

Integrates with Kindling.

Sitting behind the Open solution is Kindling, our best of breed idea management solution. Bring great ideas that originate outside of your organization into Kindling for internal evaluation. Kindling Open: Innovation Through Community.