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Getting Started with Jenni |
Getting started with Jenni is easy and only requires a small amount of
effort on your part.
First, you need to assign tasks...
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IdeaMaster has administrative control over Jenni. You may
have as many IdeaMasters as you like, although there will normally
be one primary IdeaMaster who oversees Jenni and liaises with us.
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Idea Managers are people who can set up and manage ideas campaigns
(in other words, they will launch innovation challenges, oversee ideas
and send ideas to review). Idea Managers are usually division managers
with budgets and/or decision making power. When most organisations
start off with Jenni, the IdeaMaster also takes on the Idea Manager
role and runs the first ideas campaigns. So, don't worry too much
about Idea Managers just yet.
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Experts are the people who will do evaluations and SWOT analyses
of ideas. With Jenni, you can either grant individual users expert
status or you can create evaluation teams who can review ideas. Most
likely you will have different experts/teams for different kinds of
ideas. With your first ideas campaign or two, we recommend you select
a couple of colleagues, who are involved in your idea management decision
making, to act as experts. Later, you can develop specialised teams.
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Regular users are everyone else who can access Jenni, submit
ideas, browse ideas and collaborate on ideas. Jenni is so easy to
use, most regular users can log in and start sharing ideas immediately.
Nevertheless, we provide you with a customised e-mail announcement
you can send to all employees (or those employees who will participate
at launch time). This e-mail announcement explains about Jenni and
how to get started.
Secondly, you will need to communicate what is happening..
When getting started with idea management, it is critical to communicate
what you are doing and why. If people do not know about your idea management
endeavour, they will not participate. Ideally, part of this communication
should come from top management. Let's face it, if the people at the top
say idea management is important to your firm, employees will listen.
There are a number of ways you can communicate your idea management programme
and introduce Jenni...
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Staff meetings with managers. Telling managers about Jenni,
how it will benefit the firm and how it will help them more easily
manage innovation is a good start. Get their feedback as well. Successful
idea management is all about collaborative development. Involving
managers and employees in developing your idea management process
gives them a stake in the process.
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E-mail announcements. Jenni provides tools that let you e-mail
employees about new ideas campaigns, existing ideas campaigns, new
ideas and more. In addition, you can e-mail employees an early announcement
about Jenni, why you are implementing it and what you hope to achieve.
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Newsletters, Intranet, web site, bulletin boards and other
information resources in your company can also be used to inform people
about your idea management programme and Jenni.
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Rewards for all ideas submitted to early campaigns can be
an effective incentive to encourage people to try out Jenni and submit
ideas. Rewards do not need to be big. Even small rewards like a bite-sized
chocolate for each idea submitted can stimulate impressive results.
If you'd like, we can even provide you with delicious Belgian chocolates
for rewards.
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Innovation training workshops are highly effective. They result
in participants better understanding the innovation process as well
as appreciating the value innovation offers your firm. We can provide
a choice of innovation training workshops for your firm, from basic
training in Jenni to general innovation training workshops for managers
and employees.
Thirdly, you need to plan and launch your first ideas campaign..
An ideas campaign starts with an innovation challenge, such as "In
what ways might we improve product X?" or "How could we make
our order processing system more efficient?" and so on. Your first
challenge should focus on an issue that is of interest across your firm.
Challenges about internal processes are often effective: employees probably
already have ideas about making processes more efficient - and, as a result,
their jobs easier.
If you are familiar with innovation challenges, you probably already
have ideas about the first challenges you want to launch. If not, talk
to us. Helping you define effective innovation challenges is just a small
part of the total service package we provide every client.
Fourthly, you need to plan evaluations
At the end of the campaign, you will want to evaluate the most promising
ideas. You may also want to run SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities
and threats) analsyses and tests, such as business cases, market studies,
prototypes and the like. Jenni provides tools for all of these, but the
first step is evaluation.
You can plan evaluations at the beginning of the ideas campaign, or you
can wait to see what kind of ideas come in before planning evaluations.
No matter which route you choose, you need to do two things:
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Establish evaluation criteria for evaluating ideas. Jenni's evaluation
tool allows you to establish up to five criteria for every evaluation.
Jenni also provides you with some basic criteria sets which you can
use for new product ideas, new process ideas and other typical ideas
campaign types. It may be easiest to start with one of the default
criteria sets and, as you get used to the system, modify them or create
your own criteria sets.
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Set up one or more evaluation teams and/or assign users expert status.
These are the people to whom you will send ideas for evaluation.
Criteria based evaluations are an excellent check-point for ideas. They
are relatively quick and easy for you to set up and for experts to complete,
yet they provide a good indication of whether an idea is worth reviewing
further. Of course, if you have any questions or prefer to have some expert
guidance, we are at your service.
Finally, you need to implement the best ideas!
This goes without saying!
Contact
us today to learn more or arrange a demo...
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