Product photography lighting techniques for beginners

Alright, Let’s shed some light (pun absolutely intended) on the wild and wonderful world of product photography lighting. We’re about to embark on a journey that’ll take your content from “meh” to “marvelous” faster than you can say “cheese!” (Unless you’re actually photographing cheese, in which case, maybe say “smartphone!” instead.)

First, picture this: It’s 2011, and I’m trying to photograph a client’s new line of… wait for it… glow-in-the-dark garden gnomes. (Yes, that’s a thing. No, I don’t know why anyone needs a luminous lawn ornament, but here we are.) I thought, “Hey, they glow in the dark, so I’ll just turn off all the lights and snap away!”

The result? A bunch of blurry, green blobs that looked more like evidence of alien activity than sellable product photos.

Turns out, even glow-in-the-dark products need proper lighting. Who knew?

So, how do you light your products so they look better than a supermodel on a good hair day? Well, grab your favourite caffeinated beverage (or a glass of wine, I don’t judge), and let’s dive into some lighting techniques that’ll make your products shine brighter than a diamond in a coal mine!

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How To Enhance Your Design Studio’s Brand

There are certain businesses that, given the nature of the marketplace they are in, rely more on their branding than on others, and with furniture design studios being in a sector where image plays a huge role, branding is certain to be important. There are many ways to enhance your branding, and if you follow the advice of professional web designers, digital marketing is one of the most effective.

Digital marketing is often associated more with online sales and promoting businesses online, and whilst they certainly are important goals of a digital marketing campaign they are not the only ones. In fact, if you consider that your brand influences potential clients offline, you will recognize that digital marketing can enhance your offline activities immensely. Here are 5 actions that will ensure your digital marketing promotes and augments your brand.

Be Proactive In Seeking Positive Reviews And Testimonials

The internet has changed the ways people buy products enormously. Now, potential customers carry out far more research online than ever before with regard to what they are buying, and crucially, on any company they are considering buying from. That means they look for reviews so one of your priorities to boost your brand and reputation must be to ask your satisfied clientele to post reviews and testimonials on your website and other websites.

Pillars Of An Effective Content Strategy

While creating and publishing content on your website is better than producing no content at all, simply writing blog posts randomly and when it is convenient to do so, is not a strategy that is going to bring many positive SEO results.

Professional SEO companies advise that for your content to have all the positive impacts on your SEO, and the subsequent improvement in your search engine rankings, it needs to be done in a way, that very few other website owners would ever think of implementing.

That way is structured, has end goals, works for your audience, and not just the search engines, and it can be monitored to see if any changes to it have to be made. It consists of 4 components or pillars as we like to call them because they form the cornerstones for your content to be effective and bring results. Here are those 4 pillars…

7 Ways Business Storage Units Can Help With An Office Relocation

Moving to a new office can be tumultuous for most businesses and their employees. However, several services are available to make it less so, such as professional removalists and rental space in a storage facility. While working out what to do with office furniture, inventory, and equipment during an office relocation can be challenging, having secure storage available can be a godsend.

Melbourne storage units are undoubtedly an effective solution to these challenges. This article will outline seven ways they can significantly help business owners organize an office relocation.

#1 – Ideal Temporary Storage Solution

One of the main benefits of commercial storage units during an office relocation is their ability to provide temporary storage solutions. Moving an office can be a long and drawn-out process, and there may be a need to store items for several weeks or even months. Storage units offer a means to store stock, office equipment, and office furniture until required at the new office premises.

What is Your Business Plan?

In today’s digital era, crafting a robust business plan is more than a mere document; it’s a roadmap to success. At KINDLING: Software & Marketing Ideas, we understand the importance of a well-structured plan that is not only realistic and achievable but also motivating. Let’s delve into how a business plan can be the kindling that ignites your company’s potential.

Understanding the Essence of a Business Plan:

Well-regarded digital agency Slinky rightly points out below that a business plan is not just a formal statement of business goals but a compass guiding your business through its journey. As Forbes recently stated, a business plan is vital for startups to focus on their goals and measure their progress.

Take the story of Sarah, a budding entrepreneur in the tech industry. When she first started, her ideas were scattered, and progress was slow. However, once she developed a concise business plan, her path became clear, and she could navigate her business toward success more effectively.

How Every Web Designer Can Protect Their Business By Using Service Delivery Agreements

Although it does not happen very often to web designers, there can be occasions when a client, for whatever reason, claims that the website a web designer has delivered was not what was agreed upon. The claims can range from the website not having the appearance they asked for, fewer pages than agreed, or lacking functionality that they thought it would have.

Now, we should not be so naive to think that there are not a few rogues who sadly give the vast majority of professional web designates a bad name by selling clients short and quite rightly those clients have every right to be aggrieved. However, if we focus on web designers who genuinely strive to deliver great service and great websites,  we have to consider the scenarios where clients dispute what was agreed upon.

One of the key problems that cause such situations is that the agreement to design and create a website was done verbally, or if it were done in writing, it has the scantest of details as to what should be included. This serves neither the web designer nor the client and is why, when a dispute does happen, neither has anything to back up their side of the argument.

This can escalate and the dangers for the web designer are that they are not likely to receive final or full payment from the client, and worse, the client could set about rubbishing that web designer’s reputation by going on a crusade of posting negative reviews about them on the internet.

So, if any web designers are reading that and hoping there are ways to avoid such a situation, the good news is there are. Prime amongst them is using service delivery agreements, which are ideal for businesses that provide services such as web designers.

15 Non-Negotiable Web Design Principles That Should Apply To Every Business Website

When you consider that online data shows that there are over 1 billion websites in the world, it is safe to say that web designers have been busy. It is also true to say that no two of those 1 billion websites will be 100% identical, either in how they function or how they look. There may be some that are similar, but we can be certain none are exactly the same in all ways.

Without meaning to contradict ourselves, many of those websites which have been professionally designed will have several commonalities. By that, we mean that they will have been designed by web designers following a set of key web design principles and best practices. For any website to be remotely successful, it must have been created by following what we like to call ‘non-negotiable” web design principles.

These principles are what form the foundation of top quality website design and are why those web designers who follow them without fail are the ones who create the best websites and earn the most praise. Here are fifteen of the non-negotiable web design principles we are referring to.

7 Benefits Of Marketing Your Family Lawyers Business Online

Unless you are in the fortunate, and we dare say, a unique position, that your family lawyers business does not need any new clients, we assume you have some means of attracting prospects. What form that may take will differ somewhat between each family lawyers business, but one which must be considered by all of them is online marketing.

Given the huge expansion in the use of the internet over the past 20 years, coupled with mobile devices now giving access to the internet, any business which does not use online marketing is denying itself a huge commercial opportunity, and that includes family lawyers. Also, any family lawyers business which does not use online marketing is missing out on several benefits, such as the seven which are listed below.

Increased Revenue

It must surely follow that with a properly researched and implemented online marketing campaign, creating a greater number of prospects and generating higher conversion rates, the revenue produced by your family lawyers business will increase accordingly.

Improved Targeting Of Your Ideal Prospects

Several channels that you could use for an online marketing campaign allow you to target an audience that matches the exact demographics of those you seek as new clients. Whether that be by age, marital status, income, or location, rather than the almost zero targeting that some marketing has, e.g. newspaper ads, your online marketing will be seen only by those who are most likely to become clients.

What are the best ways to drive traffic to your online store?

So you’ve created your first online store, and you’re pretty happy with it. But there’s only one problem: You’re not getting any visitors, and there’s no way you’re ever going to make any sales without visitors to your store.

Fortunately, there’s a solution to this problem: marketing.

You can engage an experienced digital marketing agency to drive traffic to your site through various marketing methods. An experienced digital marketing agency has provided a list of the more popular digital marketing tactics.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most cost-effective ways to drive more traffic to your online store. However, it’s also a little difficult, and it can take some time to see results.

In short, SEO involves optimizing your website so that it ranks well on the search engine results pages (SERPs). For some, this may mean writing a number of high-quality, informative articles that target specific keywords or key phrases. For others, this will involve technical optimization to improve their store’s performance, product page optimization to ensure their products show up on the SERPs, or any of numerous other actions.

Top 5 Sales Management Software

No business would exist if its products or services were not being purchased by customers or clients. That leads us to the conclusion that the most important function within a business is sales. In some companies, this could be a whole team of sales staff, a single salesperson, or their online activities.

To ensure that their sales processes are as effective as possible, it is recommended that a business utilises sales management software. This provides several benefits including having data relating to sales conversions, the means to forecast sales, and also being able to analyze sales performance.

If you are not using sales management software, or feel that the current sales management software you are currently using is not satisfactory, then here are 5 of the top sales management software currently available.

1: EngageBay

Suitable For: Freelancers, Small to Medium Businesses

This is a platform that helps businesses manage their sales, marketing, customer support and CRM. Some of the specific features include deal management which presents a visual outline of individual deals as they progress. Its customer support features include Live Chat and email tracking.

As for marketing your business, EngageBay allows you to create landing pages and email sequences so that you can implement an email marketing campaign directly from the interface.

A team of up to 15 people can access the software and its simple drag and drop functionality mean that the learning curve is not difficult.

Do You Have a Business Idea, and Is It an Opportunity?

In the dynamic landscape of digital entrepreneurship, having a business idea is just the starting point. Transforming that idea into a viable opportunity requires a blend of insight, strategy, and innovation. At KINDLING: Software & Marketing Ideas, we specialize in turning your digital aspirations into tangible successes. Let’s explore how to assess if your business idea is truly an opportunity waiting to be seized.

Understanding Viability: The KINDLING Approach:

The journey begins with assessing the viability of your idea. As Harvard Business Review highlights, understanding your target market is critical. But, what does this mean in practice?

Consider Jane, an aspiring entrepreneur with a passion for sustainable fashion. By analyzing market trends and consumer preferences using KINDLING’s tools, she identified a growing demand for eco-friendly apparel among millennials. This insight transformed her idea from a mere concept to a viable business opportunity.

7 Website Design Features That Are Growing In Popularity

Web design is something that never stands still. Just when you think you might have seen everything there is to see, and have a handle on what is current, along comes another trend, update, or new website design technology that moves everything on once more. We say this not to suggest it is negative. In fact, it is quite the opposite as it means that web design never becomes stayed or boring, which can only be a positive.

Positive as it is that web design is in a constant state of evolution, one problem that does arise is that you can lose track of what is currently popular for designing websites. This is especially so if you work outside the web design bubble and wish to know which current web design trends you should be discussing with the designers creating a new website for your business. To help you, we have outlined 7 web design features currently popular and likely to remain so for some time.

#1: Smaller Logos

Whilst having effective branding on your website will never cease to be important, there has been a move away from ‘in your face’ branding. In other words, huge logos dominating the home and other pages are out. Instead, smaller logo designs that appear more like icons are in, as this frees up much of the prime home page real estate for other, more important design elements.

5 Essential Website Functions That cPanel Enables You To Do

Across the huge array of different website hosting companies, you will find a variety of services and functions which are offered to clients. This will include the control panel that is used to manage the website and in the vast majority of cases that will be cPanel. Although not the only control that can be used to manage websites, it is the one that most website owners recognise and have experience of using.

One of the benefits of cPanel’s widespread use across most hosting companies is it means that should a website owner wish to switch hosting companies, or at least try a different one for a new website, there is not a huge learning curve with respect to managing that website. cPanel looks and operates pretty much the same on all hosting accounts, which means if you are happy with it on one web hosting service, your will be happy with it on any other that uses it.

Who Should I Invite to My Kindling Campaign?

Customers often ask about how large of an audience should they invite to a particular innovation challenge or topic. While there’s no right answer, there is an important consideration to think through when selecting an audience—how size impacts the potential for serendipity as well as the potential for noise for your participants:

Trade-off

As an example, picture your Kindling Campaign where you’re trying to solve a problem that’s been plaguing your business. As you increase the audience size, you increase the likelihood that people’s different perspectives will combine to help inform a potential solution (see this described by Rick Michelman in our Michelman customer video). This is represented by the serendipity axis, where a larger audience increases the opportunities for interactions and creative outcomes.

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A Simple Guide To Web Hosting For Beginners

For anyone starting out with their first website, one of the foundations which need to be in place for that website to exist, or more accurately for anyone to be able to visit that website, is a website hosting service. If this is the first time you have planned to launch a website, the functions and jargon that applies to web hosting might not all be clear, and thus we thought it would be useful if we offered some basic guidelines for beginners.

We must make clear that what you are about to read is as generic as we could make it so the information should apply to most of the web hosting services you might be considering. For details on the specific hosting services any provider offers, you will need to speak to them directly, especially if they have various plans available which offer different options.

Marketing by Making Decisions

We spend a lot of time working with our Kindling customers to help them build sustainable innovation programs. And no matter how creative or how forward-thinking the organizations we work with prove to be, time and time again we see that the single biggest predictor of success is management’s active commitment to the program.

Active commitment can be best demonstrated by actively making decisions around participants’ contributions. And we’ve found that by communicating these decisions is the best marketing for the program itself.

Show and Tell
We always emphasize that an internal marketing effort can make a huge difference for the program. On a basic level, this means selecting a name for the program, establishing a visual language, creating posters and other giveaways, and offering encouragement and rewards. The goal for this generalized marketing of the innovation program is to make sure that the participants, who are invariably super-busy, know that the program exists and what the goals and expectations are for participating. We think of this as the broadcasting of a mass message, or as general advertising for your program.

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Drive Your Social Media Content with Kindling

At Kindling we use the Kindling application to discuss and evaluate potential product features, to address engineering issues, to develop strategic goals,—we’ve even opened up a Category to our customers so that they can contribute their ideas to the development of the Kindling application. Nice. And we use Kindling to cultivate our brand and develop marketing ideas, including social media content.

Every organization can use Kindling to develop a workflow of ideas for social media which the entire company can participate in. This is how we did it.

Beginning earlier this year one of our key efforts in marketing has been to systematically generate meaningful content that could be useful to people concerned with innovation and tasked with running an innovation program, for which our software is elegantly useful. In this interest I wanted to simplify and make our Twitter content more coherent while providing clear channels for our people to contribute to. I identified 3 hashtags (for these channels) for us to use:

#kindlingapp, about the company and product, including writings about Kindling in relation to innovation best practices;
#kindlingtips, for tips on how to use Kindling, especially in relation to an innovation program, culled from Kindling Academy and our Best Practices guides;
and #kindlingreads.

A Brand New Kindling for Decision-makers

Our mission is to make software that people enjoy using. Historically, we’ve focused much of our energies on the participant of Kindling, making it fun and easy—no training required easy—to submit, discuss, and vote on ideas. This emphasis has been very much by design, as the more powerful and complex features useful for evaluating large quantities of ideas are only useful if you first have a large quantity of ideas. And you’ll only ever have a large quantity of ideas to deal with if your community is actively engaged.

(Our approach stands in contrast to our competitors, who have chosen to build advanced features with the associated complexity for evaluating large quantities of ideas, and now are trying to backfill simplicity and usability into their applications. This is a difficult, if not impossible, knot to untie.)

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Heartbleed

On Monday, April 7th, a major bug in the popular SSL library OpenSSL was announced, generally known as Heartbleed. The vulnerability, in a nutshell:

Without using any privileged information, authentication codes or credentials we were able to steal the secret keys used for our X.509 certificates, user names and passwords, instant messages, emails and business critical documents and communication.

Kindling uses OpenSSL on our servers for HTTPS connections, and as soon as the vulnerability was announced we began working to mitigate our exposure by upgrading our versions of the affected libraries and invalidating any secure keys that might have been leaked. Our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services, also quickly moved to prevent exploitation of the vulnerability within their infrastructure.

Some Tips on Innovating with Kindling

Companies often come to us looking to solve a particular challenge in their organization or for help with their innovation program as a whole. We enjoy working with them, and they find that Kindling provides a structured approach toward innovation and problem solving, while integrating throughout their organization, increasing communication, and reducing organizational barriers. We’d like to offer some ways in which Kindling can help with innovation in your organization.

1. Find out what your company can be doing better

Ask your employees where they see room to improve. What are the biggest inefficiencies in your company? Where is there room to cut costs? Everyone in your organization has ideas—listen to them.

2. Organize conversations around ideas

Eliminate the email CC problem. Not on an email chain? Getting too many emails? Include all participants from the beginning and reduce the risk of missing someone who might have shared a game changing idea.

Eat, Work, Enjoy

Seeking balance between work and life is so often on people’s minds. More enjoyable work could tip the balance a little towards more life.

Some principles to live by:

  1. Eat good things.
  2. Work at what you love.
  3. Join the conversation, communicate well.
  4. Don’t go to bed with ideas buzzing around your head—share them.
  5. Find inspiration.
  6. Make your voice heard.
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Design as Mission

Design Not Decoration
Design has been “misconstrued as decoration or as an embellishment.” 
—Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator and Director of Research and Development, MoMA, in an interview.

It happens in many fields—whether in the production of a brochure, the renovation of an interior, or the building of an application feature—that “design” is often brought late to the table to prettify, decorate, or add “touch and feel” to something that was always already designed. Because the moment you begin to lay out the content, structure, and form of something, you are engaged in the act of design whether you know it or not and whether or not you are any good at it.

Bringing someone in later, after key decisions are made, someone with special competence in doing those things, to fix or make look good the outcome of those decisions, will almost always waste time, lead to deep frustration, and ultimately make it difficult to accomplish what you wanted to accomplish in the first place. Because design is about all those decisions, and making them at the right time—design is not “decorative sauce poured on top of content” (to paraphrase the photographer Stephen Shore).

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Kindling’s Mission: Software People Enjoy Using

It’s an incredible time to be building an enterprise software company. So many of the old problems and frustrations with this market are changing fast: purchasing gatekeepers are losing their power, buyers are valuing elegant interfaces, design is coming into play in the sales cycle (which is shrinking), people are expecting applications that require no training, previously complicated requirements such as authentication are being commoditized—the entire landscape is changing.

We’ve been predicting this massive disruption in the enterprise market and have been building a company in anticipation of a new order of enterprise software. We think we’re not alone. Slack had a great launch last month, and we’ll start seeing many more endeavors like this: a thoughtfully designed app attacking a specific portion of the enterprise market with consumer software sensibilities and an eye for design. It’s about time.

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How We Used Kindling at AfterCollege to Engage Everyone in Idea Generation

It’s easy to talk about idea management. It’s much harder to do it in practice. Including everyone in idea generation, in a way that is productive, takes effort. Collecting feedback on each idea can be tedious. But we know involving everyone in idea evaluation leads to better outcomes.

If implemented thoughtfully, you can remove a lot of the barriers, and reap the benefits. Let’s take an in-depth look at how we did both at my last company.

Engaging Everyone in Idea Generation
Within my first month of starting at AfterCollege, I knew I wanted to roll out an idea management solution. Our team was engaged. They cared a lot about the work that we were doing and I wanted to make sure that everyone had an opportunity to be heard.

Want a Fresh Start in Innovation? Ask. Cultivate. Value. Reward.

Ah, January, the beginning of the New Year. The holidays are over, everything that happened in 2013 is the past, and we’re already almost into the second month of the year. Now is a time of reflection, new beginnings, and looking onward. A magical time of year for businesses as they now start anew.

While some may not see this similarity, for me, the New Year is like Spring Training in baseball. Everyone looks at the upcoming year with high aspirations and lofty goals for how they will perform. The signings during the offseason, the conditioning they did to prepare, and everyone coming back 100% healthy can invigorate a fresh outlook. For businesses, the start of the New Year is similar in that it comes with aspirations for high performance in the upcoming year, how they will grow, and how they will succeed in their market.

The challenge for both is execution.

What learnings from the past year will they try to use so they are not inhibited by the same types of roadblocks? For businesses, this is an opportunity to examine their innovation efforts and how to do better in 2014. Below are a few quick tips on how to make your innovation efforts even better in 2014.

1. Ask Your Teams How to Improve
In the latter end of last year and first couple of weeks in January, you probably spent a good portion of time reviewing 2013 performance and what 2014 should look like. The reality is that while many of the things you had set out for in the beginning of last year may have been achieved, there are probably a number of areas that did not do so well and need attention this upcoming year. Added reality, your business and/or the market may have changed, which also might be impacting how to focus your efforts for the upcoming year. While there will always be primary goals and metrics, i.e. profit, market growth, customer retention, etc., there are so many other factors that will contribute to your success.

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Let Me Count the Ways: an Array of Authentication Options to Keep Your Employees Engaged in Innovation

In any innovation program, employee engagement is critical for success. Employees drive the ideas and discussion that lead to results. We posted recently about one way to keep participants engaged, with a responsive design that supports a user’s contributions from any device. This post focuses on another important way to keep engagement high, by making it easy for participants to sign in and reducing the friction that forgetting a username or password can create.

In 2013 we added three new methods for logging into Kindling: SAML, Google and Yammer authentication. Not only did we make it easier than ever to access Kindling, but we also integrated with many of the SaaS enterprises that are already part of your daily workflow. The key factor common to all of these integrations is that they enable you to take advantage of your already-existing identity stores. This means no work maintaining a separate user store for Kindling and easier access for Kindling participants, who can log in without having to keep track of yet another username and password. We’ve all seen that familiar “forgot your password” message and then either spent 5 minutes resetting the password or given up completely and moved onto another task. Since innovation software is dependent upon social interaction, it’s crucial to get this first step right. After all, you can’t crowdsource without the crowd!

SAML Authentication
SAML has become an industry standard for authentication and is growing in acceptance in enterprises. It is a secure mechanism for communicating login information between two parties, an ‘Identity Provider’, which manages the identity information for everyone at your organization, such as usernames and passwords, and a ‘Service Provider’, in this case Kindling. When a user logs in with SAML, behind the scenes, they are initiating communication between these parties to verify their identity and log them into Kindling. SAML doesn’t access your user information directly, instead, SAML only asks for verification of particular users. SAML bypasses issues of a direct connection to the server in a corporate network and this makes it more secure than LDAP or Active Directory.

A Digital Inspiration Board for Your Innovation Program

There’s a fundamental law of web & application design: users will only click buttons that offer a clear payoff for themselves. No matter how much you as the designer want them to interact with something, or how amazing you think the interaction is, busy users will only do those things that deliver value for them.

With that in mind, tagging has always fascinated me. Systems that get tagging right are able to deliver to the user individual payoff. Examples of this are tagged photos in flickr that provide context and discoverability, tags in iPhoto that make it easier to find that great photo of your kid on vacation and tags in Pinboard to help organize your many digital bookmarks.

As an application designer, if you are able to tap into those individual motivations for tagging, and if your application is at some reasonable level of scale, some really interesting things can emerge. Imagine the effort to get hundreds of thousands of people to add metadata about Chelsea FC or a particular article? This rich set of contextual information emerges “for free” by leveraging the individual’s motivations.

Tagging and Media in Kindling

We’ve spent a lot of time this year building into Kindling support for media of all types, from pictures of whiteboards, to videos taken on phones or produced professionally. We’ve also focused on tapping into the individual motivations that allow tagging to proliferate — people can tag themselves with skills and interests to inform their profile and drive better recommendations as well as tag content to add context and make their ideas more easily found and tracked.

Keep Employees Engaged in Innovation with Responsive Design

We live in a multi-device world where we spend our time in front of a variety of digital screens: laptops, projectors, plasma televisions, CRT monitors, retina LCDs, Hi-DPI smartphones, tablets, phablets, and more.

Placeholder image of devices

Choosing which device to use depends on context: where you are, how much time you have, and what you want to accomplish. Great ideas, however, don’t care about context. And they won’t wait until you’re sitting in front of your office computer to materialize.

At Kindling we understand this, which is why we’ve built a responsive web application that enables you to capture, share, and collaborate on innovative ideas no matter where you are or what electronic device you have available. Supporting multiple contexts through responsive design means more participation from users, which means more collaboration amongst people, which means better ideas for your organization. Everybody wins!

Why Innovation Programs Fail

We write often on this blog about the actions that lead to long-term success with your innovation program, but this time we thought we’d share some of the common reasons we’ve seen that can contribute to failure.

Reason 1: Missing Feedback Loop
A lack of a feedback loop from decision-makers to participants is the most common contributor to the failure of an innovation program. Ensuring a feedback loop is therefore the best action you can take to sustain the program over months and years.

There’s a universal truth about people and their workday—they are tremendously busy. We see this consistently across all of our customers and prospects. And busy people full of ideas are willing to give a new innovation program a try. But then time passes. If decisions are not being made, and participants see that nobody is listening on the other end, people can sniff this out and determine that further participation is a waste of their time.

Busy people don’t have time to speak into the void, so they don’t. And as much as momentum drives participation on launch of the program, it can drag it down when there is no feedback loop from decision-makers.

The bottom line: if you’re going through the energy to launch an innovation program, follow through on the commitment you’re creating for your team and make sure to make decisions. No feedback loop means no sustainable innovation program.

Reason 2: Incompatible Culture
Recently, there’s been a lot of buzz around building a culture of innovation. Why all the focus? Can culture really drive the likelihood of success with an innovation program?

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Communications Archiving

The topic of regulatory compliance may not exactly be exciting, but when one of our financial services customers came to us with the requirement of secure messaging of all user communication to a message vault, it became clear that the need to store electronic communications for business related purposes doesn’t just stop at email anymore. Many organizations have already started injecting other types of communications—ESNs like Salesforce Chatter or Yammer, for example—into their infrastructure and day-to-day business. Because of the regulations that govern certain industries, the obligation to store and archive these new types of message channels is just as important as more legacy types of communications, like email.

At Kindling, we love challenges and building tools and features to better serve the needs of our customers. When one of our financial services customers came to us with this requirement, I thought “Ah, I know how we can do that.” And we have an excellent platform to build from. Designing and implementing what we call our Vault Message Notification Service was pretty straightforward: we already had an extensive event architecture through which all messages flow, and we had a lot of experience with secure and redundant systems.

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