Services in Idea, Innovation & Cultural Change Management

  • We are the exclusive partner of "Kindling", the usability leader in idea management solutions, with 70-90% user acceptance rates in all client installations; getting user input is the key to success, and no other software solution comes close
  • We provide turnkey idea & innovation management support, where our experienced Idea Management Coaches work with clients to implement a solution that incorporates all the necessary cultural and organizational aspects that you need

Up to now, idea and innovation management have too often been a theoretical exercise where consultants or software integrators can spend months in companies for little tangible result. However, it is actually possible to get results quickly, using professional tools that employees enjoy using. To make those results relevant to your market and business goals, our professional Idea Management Coaches help to make it exactly fit your organizational situation.


Idea Management Coaches

What are idea management coaches? Our experts have each spent over 25 years supporting companies in organizational challenges or as conflict management coaches. They bring expertise in communication and in company culture issues, combined with a wealth of practical management experience in medium and large organizations.


What is needed to make innovation management effective

We believe that idea and innovation management is not about IT skills or innovation process management, which are already strong in most Western European companies, but rather about:

  • usability
  • communication
  • adapting to company cultural challenges

The challenge is to create a business that can react fast to client needs and market changes. To overcome emerging global market challenges from Chinese, Indian or other overseas competitors, companies need a culture that fosters energy and enthusiasm, where employees enjoy becoming idea and innovation contributors.

To put it plainly, to achieve their innovation potential, businesses need organizational and cultural expertise, and to employ the best business tools. We provide the tools, and the coaches who help your company make the most of them.


Idea & Innovation Management Software Solution

Extendance is the exclusive partner of the Kindling idea and innovation management software solution in Switzerland. Prior to our commitment with Kindling, we evaluated several tools and Kindling was the clear winner. 


A few reasons are:

Simplicity
Kindling's feature set is comprehensive and tightly business-goal orientated. Kindling achieved this by working closely with business partners in development. Although the back-end functionality was highly important for obtaining the most relevant output, the single most important feature is the quality of input – in other words, the level of user participation. To achieve this, simplicity is the key. Kindling made sure they had a ready-to-use application, with user controls that are self-explanatory.

What simplicity achieves:

  • Users get busy on it with no prior training
  • Users focus on the ideas that interest them, not on the idea submission process
  • Deployment is fast, with no need to reconfigure software after launch
  • Ease of scaling allows deployment in single departments or across the whole company.

Powerful Enterprise Functionality and Support
Kindling's reporting and data export functions track company ROI and KPI objectives, and offer idea, user and activity analysis. To avoid extra work for your IT department, integrating the application into existing company software has been made as simple as possible, providing:

  • SharePoint and Outlook Integration
  • Central Authentication and single sign-on
  • Enterprise class security
  • Access to Kindling's API
  • A configurable notification system

Kindling is available to you through SaaS or as a hosted solution at your premises. Extendance provides support in both cases.

Strong Deployment Expertise
Kindling's solution was developed in the first place by parent company, ARC90. Unable to find an innovation solution flexible and intuitive enough to match the pace of their software development, they built one themselves. Having experienced Kindling's benefits, ARC90 knew they were onto something important, so they then made the solution available to external partners:

  • US-Government Veterans Administration Department
  • Symantec
  • Medtronic

How it works
In addition to the simplicity of user input, Kindling makes idea contribution a highly social process that strongly rewards participation through offering sophisticated reputation scoring and rating of ideas. Where idea processes are tied to a particular campaign, companies can link user scores to tangible rewards in order to gain fast momentum. Scores are not only based on idea submission, but on the other key processes of collaboration such as discussion, editing, idea revision, and history. Kindling also includes features such as idea assignment, and volunteer tracking, where users commit themselves to working further on an idea they have voted for.
To ensure that ideas are unique, Kindling performs duplicate idea checking and guides users to contribute to existing ideas. Sorting of ideas and users is automated on the basis of relevance, rating and activity.
Kindling can be further integrated with other existing solutions and customized to your requirements if you have specific needs.