Jenni Innovation Process Management (IPM)

Jenni is an enterprise idea management software that is designed to do much more than just capture ideas. Rather, Jenni enables your managers to align idea generation with strategy and provides the industry's best set of evaluation tools in order to ensure that you identify the ideas with the greatest value potential. So, while other so-called idea management products capture lots of ideas, Jenni helps you identify strategically focused business ideas that will power your innovation initiative.

Structured Innovation Process

Jenni follows a structured innovation process that is designed to align idea generation with strategy, build collaborative solutions to specific business problems and identify ideas which have the greatest innovation potential (and by our definition, that means profitable!).

The process, based on well establish creative problem solving (CPS) methodology, is simple yet remarkably effective:

1. Managers launch highly configurable ideas campaigns centered around specific innovation challenges. An ideas campaign may be open to all employees and even non-employees; or it can be restricted to specific divisions, locations or teams.

2. Participants submit and collaborate on ideas via an extremely intuitive interface.

3. Managers send ideas to experts for evaluations using business criteria, SWOT Analyses and other review processes in order to identify which ideas have the greatest potential to become innovations. Similar ideas can even be combined into idea clusters to improve efficiency of the evaluation process. Jenni's evaluation suite is second to none -- and ensures you select the most profitable ideas for implementation.

4. Jenni compiles evaluations, SWOT analyses and other assessments into scorecards and reports for easy review.

Jenni's is much more than a machine for generating lots of ideas. It is a process based application designed to generate innovations that fit your strategic needs.

Jenni versus Suggestion Schemes

Over the past couple of years a number of software firms have begun selling idea management tools which are essentially suggestion boxes. These suggestion scheme software products invite employees to submit ideas in an interactive environment, but they lack the structure of an innovation process. Typically, the only evaluation tool they offer is popular voting with no guidance on criteria. Such tools may be cheap or even free. But in use are ineffective and demand a huge time investment from your most valuable employees. That makes them remarkably expensive to operate, particularly in view of the poor results typically shown.

Learn More

Follow this link to take a quick look at how Jenni works in five easy steps...

Follow this link to talk to someone about how Jenni could help you launch an innovation initiative that follows your strategic needs.

Question: what do you want from your idea management software?

a) ideas

b) innovation

If you answered...

a) ideas: you will be pleased to know that there are many low cost and even free tools that will collect ideas. With good promotion and a large user base, you can easily collect 1000s or even 10,000s of ideas. Of course you have to decide what to do with all of those ideas. But with low cost or home built software, that is your (expensive) problem.

b) innovation: you need a software that provides a comprehensive innovation process that aligns idea generation with strategy, facilitates collaborative idea development and provides evaluation and idea review tools that enable you to identify which ideas have the greatest potential to become innovations. You need a tool like Jenni.

Running an ideas campaign with Jenni will not leave you with 1000s of mostly irrelevant ideas. Rather, it will provide you with a small set of strategically relevant ideas together with evaluation reports indicating why these ideas are most likely to generate value for your firm. In other words, Jenni helps you to innovate.

So, if you just want ideas, go for the cheapest option. But if you want to innovate, read up on Jenni or contact us today.

Recommended Downloads

Download Jeffrey Baumgartner's Introduction to Idea Management (PDF file: 475KB) to learn the basics about idea management.

For a broader picture on establishing an innovation initiative in your firm, download Jeffrey Baumgartner's highly popular Corporate Innovation Machine paper here.

You have a process for marketing, a process for accounting, a process for human resources. Why not a process for innovation?