Selecting the Best Ideas

Any idea management software product can collect lots of ideas. But unless your business is only interested in ideas, you need to be able to identify which ideas have the greatest potential to become innovations (definition).

Jenni provides you with a suite of evaluation tools that streamline the idea review process. Moreover, Jenni's innovation process focuses idea generation on specific strategic business goals and problems. This not only ensures a higher percentage of useable ideas than is the case with competing products, but it also allows you to combine ideas thematically in order to build powerful innovative solutions.

Jenni's suite of evaluation tools include:

• Idea clustering allows you to combine thematically similar ideas into a cluster which can then be treated as a single idea. This speeds up evaluation and development substantially.

• Evaluation matrix is Jenni's most powerful tool. An authorised manager can select a group of ideas, apply a criteria set to the group and select a team to perform the evaluation. Evaluators (and idea owners) are notified by e-mail and use simple on-line forms to rate ideas according to business criteria. Jenni generates an overall scorecard for the entire ideas campaign (definition) as well as detailed evaluation reports for each idea.

• SWOT Analysis is a well established business idea evaluation tool. That's why Jenni includes a tool that allows managers to set up SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analyses, assign evaluators and notify all parties. As analyses are completed, Jenni compiles information in SWOT scorecard as well as individual SWOT reports for each analysed idea.

• Elimination rounds based on simple criteria allow you to remove from view ideas which are clearly not viable. Nevertheless, Jenni e-mails idea owners a short note explaining why their ideas have been eliminated.

• Idea export/development allows you to send an idea from Jenni on to any software tool you are using for further development. You can assign experts to complete to do business cases, project management, cash-flow forecasting or any other software based process your firm uses for developing ideas into viable concepts.

• Implementation tagging ensures people know when their ideas are implemented and provides better statistics on the effectiveness of your idea management initiative.

No other idea management software provides such a wealth of evaluation tools. No other software can so effectively identify the most powerful ideas.

A word of warning about...

Voting

Many budget idea management software products boast a voting system as their method of identifying the "best ideas". However, voting is nothing more than a popularity contest. With such systems, people will vote for an idea based on internal politics, personal needs and even the attractiveness of the person who submitted the idea. Such selection criteria might be fine for social networking, but should not be the basis of informed business decision making. Worse, highly creative ideas, being very unusual by their nature, are typically voted down in popularity contests. And that makes such ideas harder to identify.

Question: what is the single most costly component of your innovation process?

Answer: time

An efficient evaluation process means your top employees spend less time reviewing ideas and more time generating value for you firm.

Jenni innovation process management has the best, most comprehensive evaluation suite available today.

If identifying potentially innovative ideas is more important to you than generating lots of ideas, contact us today and arrange a demonstration of Jenni. Once you evaluate your innovation needs, you will find that Jenni is the best idea in the world!