Blog – Page 4 – Kindling

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?

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.

How Evaluating Ideas is Like Finding the Right Halloween Costume

It’s Halloween, the day anyone who likes a chance to get dressed up or an excuse to eat candy has been waiting for.

For many, finding and designing a Halloween costume for yourself or your children is daunting. There are several factors to consider: What’s your budget? Do you like wearing face paint? What will the weather be? How much time do you have to buy or construct your costume? Are you shooting for a best costume prize?

Finding the Right Halloween Costume
After many years of struggling to find the right costume, I’ve finally discovered the process for finding the perfect Halloween costume:

What’s New in Kindling?

We’re working towards some great new features that will ship later this year, but I wanted to review some of the new capabilities that we’ve added to Kindling in the last few months. These features were a collaborative effort between our Product & Development Teams and our customers. We hope you like them!

Support for Media on Posts
We continue to make additions to Kindling for decision-makers to make it easier for users of Kindling to share media of any type in the application. With this week’s release you can now attach any media to Posts and multiple files to a Post, just as you’ve been able to do for Ideas.

This allows you to share that PDF, add images or take a video of your CIO describing the cost savings from the latest implemented idea.

How a Startup Uses Innovation Technology (Wrapping Up)

In this Series, we’ve shown you how our Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Services Teams use Kindling among themselves, within the company and with our key customers and partners.

Using our product has allowed us to better communicate with each other and with our customers, to solve problems as they arise and to find areas of the product that need improvement. Zooming up a bit, we’ve also learned several key lessons along the way. Some of these were hard-earned, and many apply to any start-up. We figured that sharing these would be a good way to wrap up the Series.

Lesson 1 — We Don’t Know Everything.
We’re smart, but we don’t know everything. By asking both our employees and our customers how we need to get better, we acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers. With every idea submitted, regardless of its source, we are reminded of that very true fact. A start-up needs to be a listening and learning entity, because you’re trying to create something anew in an uncertain, often risky environment. Only by listening and quickly adapting can you navigate towards success.

Are you asking the right questions of your employees? Your customers are trying to talk to you, are you listening?

How A Startup Uses Innovation Technology (Part 3)

Kindling was born to address a need — a growing group of designers and technologists were finding it difficult to keep track of ideas and the discussions around these ideas. We were trying to address the problems that were emerging as we scaled the business . We didn’t have a way to centralize ideas, to manage the feedback from our customers, to communicate with our remote employees, or a non “gut” way of determining what development items should take priority over others. Email was failing us.

Kindling owes its success not just to selling our software, but also to using it. This post is an introspective on how we at Kindling use our own product (or dogfooding, in context of software). From Product Management to Development to Sales & Marketing, we all find benefits from being connected to the centre of our business — ideas.

Part 3: Customer Services
Part 1 of this series was an interview with our CEO and Product Lead on how he and the Kindling Product Team use Kindling to shape the product roadmap, and Part 2 was an interview with our Strategic Account Executive on how our Sales Team uses Kindling to add a market perspective to product discussions. Part 3 is an interview with our Director of Customer Services, on how the Customer Services Team uses Kindling to better address our customers’ needs.

How A Startup Uses Innovation Technology (Part 2)

Kindling was born to address a need — a growing group of designers and technologists were finding it difficult to keep track of ideas and the discussions around these ideas. We were trying to address the problems that were emerging as we scaled the business. We didn’t have a way to centralize ideas, to manage the feedback from our customers, to communicate with our remote employees, or a non “gut” way of determining what development items should take priority over others. Email was failing us (click here to learn more about a free program designed exclusively for Startups).

How a Startup Uses Innovation Technology (Part 1)

Kindling was born to address a need — a growing group of designers and technologists were finding it difficult to keep track of ideas and the discussions around these ideas. We were trying to address the problems that were emerging as we scaled the business. We didn’t have a way to centralize ideas, to manage the feedback from our customers, to communicate with our remote employees, or a non “gut” way of determining what development items should take priority over others. Email was failing us (click here to learn more about a free program designed exclusively for Start-ups).

Part 1 – Product
The first part of this series is an interview with CEO and Product Lead focused on how he and the Kindling Product Team use Kindling to engage with employees, partners and customers to help shape the product roadmap.

Announcing Kindling Loves Startups

We’re announcing a new program today, Kindling Loves Startups, where we’re giving away 50 seats of Kindling to any startup for free. This post gives some of the background for the program, why we’re doing this and how Kindling solves a real need for every startup.

I love startups. Everything’s ahead of them, they’re like an NFL team in preseason — all hope. We’re gonna win the Super Bowl this year.

Through the course of my work, I often get to meet startup founders. I always enjoy these conversations. If you ever are feeling tired or demotivated, have a coffee with someone involved in starting a company — their energy and optimism is contagious.

Navigating a startup from creation to success can be viewed as an exercise in expert decision-making. Choosing the right things to focus on — and the things to not focus on — might be the most important skill for startup founders and early employees. And I know from my own experiences starting companies that there is no shortage of things to do, and no lack of opportunity.

A New Idea for Marketers: Learn from Your Development Team

I spent most of last week at HubSpot’s Inbound conference in Boston. It was an inspiring series of speakers, presentations, and sessions with action items that I plan to implement at Kindling over the next few months. I left fired up about our marketing program and the ways to use HubSpot (and yes, I’ve already put the dates for next year’s Inbound conference in my calendar).

Do you remember the enthusiastic telemarketers who called around dinner time in the ‘90s announcing “This is a courtesy call from Company X?” When we were growing up, my brother and I used to call these interruptions “discourtesy calls” and as soon our family got callerID, we stopped answering them. The Do Not Call list limited this form of telemarketing in 2003, and Inbound highlighted that it’s not just telemarketing that’s over – we’re moving away from all unsolicited “interruption” marketing. Today’s consumers are accustomed to finding the information they want, when they want it, and Marketers need to use the data we can now collect about our customers to provide them with the right solution for their needs, formatted for the device of their choice.