Jenni's Idea Evaluation Suite
How to find the ideas with the greatest innovation potential

There are a lot of tools on the market for capturing ideas from your employees. However, very few of them provide the critical tools you need for evaluating those captured ideas in order to identify the solutions that have the greatest potential to become profitable innovations.

Without proper evaluation tools, your idea management solution may actually hinder your innovation process and bog down your managers with a deluge of varied ideas! Consider, one web based suggestion box boasts having acquired over 11,000 ideas. That's great. But those ideas are not focused on business needs and the suggestion box does not provide any evaluation tools. As a result, the people in charge of the suggestion box have to sift through 11,000 dissimilar ideas, reading and considering each idea individually. That is not very efficient. At 10 minutes per idea, it would require over 1,800 hours of your staff's time just to sift through all of the ideas!

Fortunately, we know that innovation is not just about collecting ideas! Rather it is about identifying ideas that have potential and developing them into profitable innovations. That's why Jenni provides you with a structured process and a suite of tools that help you manage ideas efficiently and identify the most promising ideas easily.

• Ideas campaign structure. ideas campaigns focus innovative thinking on specific business problems. As a result, you capture a batch of ideas that focus on a particular business need. These ideas can be combined and comparatively evaluated much more easily than the unrelated and often irrelevant ideas that most suggestion box systems collect.

• Pass/Fail test. Jenni's quick pass fail evaluation based on a simple test (such as whether or not ideas meet a specified criterion) is the best way to whittle down a large number of ideas to a more manageable number of promising ideas.

• 5x5 Evaluation matrix via peer review. The evaluation matrix is a great way to determine whether or not an idea should be developed further. The concept is simple. A batch of ideas together with a set of evaluation criteria is sent to a team of experts. Each expert compares each idea to each criterion, giving it a score based on how well that idea meets that criterion. The results are correlated with a bit of number crunching and the ideas with the highest evaluation scores also have the highest innovation potential. Fortunately, Jenni automates the process of setting up evaluations as well as provides dynamic overall scorecards and detailed evaluation reports for each idea. Not only does this make finding the best ideas a breeze, but the evaluation reports help you defend those ideas to managers, clients and other stakeholders.

• SWOT Analysis. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analyses have long been a business standard. That's why Jenni includes a SWOT Analysis tool that allows you to send ideas to experts for review. Moreover, thanks to Jenni's unique SWOT metrics and our criticism-challenge approach to SWOT analysis, you can get more detailed SWOT information including a scorecard and a detailed report for each idea.

• Develop ideas. Once good ideas are identified, they do not suddenly stop improving. Rather they need to be developed into structured concepts and implemented. But, the chances are that your company already has tools for this purpose; tools like business case templates, project management software, cashflow forecasting, PowerPoint presentation and the like. Jenni's idea development tool makes it easy for your teams to develop ideas as well as to move them from Jenni to your existing software applications. Of course if you lack such applications, your Jenni innovation coach can work with you to identify and install the right tools for your needs.

• Implementation. When you decide to implement ideas, you can tick them as implemented in Jenni. This simple process serves two important purposes. Firstly, it rewards the people who devised and developed the idea by letting them know you've decided to implement it. Secondly, it allows Jenni -- and you -- to keep statistics on your company's innovation performance overall as well as by division, location and at the individual level.

If you feel Jenni offers more tools than you need, you can stop worrying now! You are not obligated to use all of Jenni's evaluation tools all of the time. Just as a tool box provides more tools than a carpenter needs for any specific job, Jenni's evaluation suite provides a choice of tools to ensure the one you need is always available when you need it. Tools you don't need, you don't have to use. We can even switch some tools off for you if you'd like.

The important point to bear in mind is that with Jenni's sophisticated idea evaluation tool set, the process of identifying the most innovative ideas has become easier, faster and more efficient than ever. Only with Jenni!

Want to know more? Contact us today!

™