When the co-founders of znanja Inc. appear at DemoCamp Halifax on Sept. 23, they’ll have something they didn’t have when they entered Innovacorp’s I-3 Competition last year – a product.

The co-founders of the New Glasgow, N.S., company - Tim Houston, Jim Fitt, Dan Enman and Jimmy Mabey - entered the innovation competition in 2011 with little more than a concept. It was software that converts normal, Word-based training material into an eLearning packaging format called SCORM, saving huge amounts of time and money in a massive industry.

Znanja (pronounced  NAN-ja) makes it easy to convert existing training materials to SCORM compliant online eLearning material. Online eLearning requires users to access training material through a technology called a learning management system, or LMS, but converting traditional content and material to a format that an LMS can read can take hundreds of hours. Znanja performs the task in seconds.

“The znanja customer has the curriculum but doesn’t have it in the right format” for eLearning, said Houston in an interview. “Znanja is eLearning made easy.”

Houston and Fitt found out the hard way just how labour-intensive it can be to convert normal Word documents into LMS. They run a company called Velsoft that has produced 300 volumes of training manuals. They wanted them converted so that they could be “played” through an LMS but found it would often take a week or more to manually convert a single 80-page instruction manual.

They looked for an automated way to perform the task, and found there was none. So the development team went to work creating software that could do it. Today with znanja, they can convert that 80-page document in seconds.

Houston said the company is solving a lot of pain in a huge industry. Companies around the world spend $200 billion each year on employee learning and development, and eLearning now represents 24 percent of all the money spent on training activities.

Znanja placed second in Zone 1 (Northern Mainland) in the I-3 Competition, and Houston makes it clear he wasn’t satisfied with the position. It landed the company $25,000 in support, and it received a $250,000 loan from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. That’s got the venture to the stage at which it will beta-test its product in October or November.

“Getting content into an LMS is a significant challenge,” said Houston.  “It is expensive.  And since it is human, it is error prone. People are asking us for this all the time because there’s a lot of money being spent to get material in the right format.”

To help with the roll-out, Znanja plans to seek equity financing worth about $1 million to $2 million once the product is complete and bringing in revenue.