During this time, more companies than ever are looking for creative new ways to help fight against disruption and get back to business as usual. One of the most effective solutions is idea management, however at Qmarkets we know it takes much more than just good ideas to deliver success. It takes a carefully managed End-to-End process:
Meet Qmarkets’ vision of the corporate innovation ecosystem. This diagram aims to encapsulate the full spectrum of strategic innovation activity; from the many potential sources of inspiration and insight, through the varied systems and processes of idea development, to the bottom-line outcomes and deliverables that are ultimately generated.
This product release is packed with features and capabilities that will assist you at every stage of the innovation ecosystem, ultimately helping you – the innovation leader – to deliver on the immense potential held by your crowd.
Next-Generation Interface: Enhanced Engagement
In this product release, we’re embarking on a journey towards the next evolution of the Qmarkets user interface. This will be a comprehensive overhaul, from top to bottom, including not only graphical changes but also new tools and functions. We know that these aren’t trivial changes, which is why we’re delivering them gradually over the next upcoming releases. This approach also gives us chance to analyze user behavior within the new environment, ensuring a close alignment between the actual needs of our clients and the updates we rollout.
This is how the new homepage interface appears on our sandbox, but remember you can customize it to fit your unique requirements.
While this won’t be the final step in the evolution of our UI, it is certainly a big one – including updates to some of the most viewed pages in an average system.
Your New and Improved Homepage
As the starting point for every user in your system, it’s essential for your homepage to be as engaging as possible. The Qmarkets innovation platform already offers an incredibly rich set of flexible homepage customization features, but this release takes that to a whole new level. Most importantly, this release gives you the ability to control where the focus of your users will be.
- Content Hive Smart Display Widget – Each homepage is composed of widgets that you can combine to suit your unique needs. While previously each widget focused on showcasing an individual type of content (campaigns, ideas, news, etc.) – the Hive Smart Display Widget allows you to promote any combination of content items that you see as relevant, all within the same strip. This is perfect for the header of your page, where you might want to promote not only your flagship campaign, but also a news post celebrating your recent success, a video from your CEO, and perhaps even your ‘how it works’ guide, all in a seamless and engaging strip.
- An Intelligent Content Spotlight Widget That Does the Work for You – Another way of showcasing content on your homepage is through dedicated ‘idea’ or ‘campaign’ widgets. In the past these would have looked the same regardless of the number of ideas or campaign on display, but now these widgets automatically adjust to show content in the most optimal way relative to the quantity.
Revitalized Idea Page to Cultivate Community Engagement
If ideas are the lifeblood of innovation, then the idea page might be considered the heart – its purpose is to maintain the flow of ideas throughout your system. In this release we’ve revamped the entire idea page to align with that objective. These new features and changes will benefit anyone who visits the page, but it might be useful to break them down to the two audiences that will benefit from them the most.
Here you can see a nice busy idea page, with plenty of content, tools, and attachments to help get the best ideas out of your users.
Your New “My Hub” Area: Step into Your Personal Innovation Cockpit
For power users and admins on any innovation platform, one of the biggest challenges can be keeping track of all the open various and activities that have been assigned to them. This is even more difficult when those action items are spread across different subsystems, or even across separate tenancies.
To ensure that every one of your users can easily keep track of their responsibilities, we have added a brand new section called “My Hub”. This will offer centralized control of all personal aspects in the system:
This brand-new area allows your users to manage relevant tasks and activities within all systems and tenancies that they are members of.
- Tasks: A comprehensive view of all actions that are waiting for your attention ordered by due date. This includes expert reviews, review committee invitations, idea tasks and more
- Notifications: A breakdown of instances where you have been tagged in the comments by other system users
- Profile: Allowing you to easily control and personalize your user profile
Showcasing Your Success with Our New Campaign Summary Page
We understand that a large percentage of the impact that your innovation project delivers, depends on your ability to successfully promote it within your organization.
This is why we’ve developed a dedicated promotion page that can be configured to appear when your campaign has ended, in order to highlight the most successful KPIs, contributors, and ideas, related to a specific initiative.
This custom page is currently an optional premium flex edition feature, so if you’re interested in making use of it – speak to your customer success manager!
Define & Manage Your Innovation Catalyst Teams
At Qmarkets we know that most of the time, innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. Behind every successful idea there is usually a diverse team of skilled individuals who come together to help deliver the final implemented solution.
For a long time, it has been possible to activate a “join the team” function on the Qmarkets innovation platform. This would allow that user to apply to become associated with a specific idea, which would make them available for contributing to the solution. However, from this release onwards you will be able to create an unlimited number of teams to fulfill a wide variety of use cases. For example:
1. Advocacy Team
This team could be available to everyone without an application process. Users who join will be ‘subscribed’ to the idea and able to contribute towards internal/private discussions about the idea and help to promote it wherever possible.
2. Incubation Team
Here you could configure a unique selection process, giving the original idea submitter control over who joins the team. Team members could be responsible for prototyping and testing the idea before deciding whether to take it further.
3. Commercialization Team
Here your users could be automatically recommended through Qmarkets’ AI, approved by the head of the campaign, and tasked with creating a business plan for implementation of your idea.
This capability opens up a whole new dimension to end-user activity within your system – giving your users the ability to demonstrate their initiative and become ‘ideapreneurs’!
Cultivate Innovation Adoption with our Best Practice Sharing Module
Your Challenge…
So, you’re at the end of the line. Your idea has traveled through your entire innovation ecosystem, from inspiration, through development and evaluation, to incubation and finally implementation. But wait, how do you ensure that your idea is implemented by all the relevant managers across the company? What if it’s a time-saving technique that could be implemented by every single blue-collar in your workforce?
…Our Solution
Sure, you can send out an email and hope for the best. But you won’t be able to track or manage the adoption of this idea, and as a result the true value of your idea (or the initiative as a whole) will never be known…
To ensure you and your team get the credit you deserve, we are now offering an end-to-end solution to this challenge, in the form of a dedicated best practice sharing subsystem.
How Does it work?
Within this system your designated “Best Practice Ambassadors” will identify and propose ideas that have the potential to become “Global Best Practices”. These are then evaluated by a predefined review committee, before being standardized for adoption across the company. This subsystem can be tailored to your unique best practice sharing process and requirements. Including a differentiated domain, and homepage.
Thanks to the Qmarkets ‘interconnectivity’ functionality, you will be able to associate the best practices with the original idea (or ideas) that inspired them. We also encourage you to implement an incentivization scheme within the system to acknowledge and reward employees.
Fully Equipped To Play Along with Your Enterprise Architecture: Qmarkets’ Latest Integrations
At Qmarkets we already offer an extensive suite of optional integrations to help you fulfil various purposes, from user authentication with G-suite, to project management with Jira, to content migration with CrunchBase. With this release we are also pleased to announce a significant boost to our integration capabilities…
Microsoft Teams Integration
Similar to our integration with other enterprise social networks, this partnership will facilitate seamless collaboration between your existing community on Microsoft teams and the Qmarkets platform. You will be able to:
- Submit ideas from within your Teams Channels
- Notify changes on ideas, state changes etc. directly to MS Teams
- Compatible with MS Teams Bot
- Embed Qmarkets pages into Teams
- Authenticate users via OAuth2/Azure
Zapier – Integration ‘Translator’
For those of you who are not already familiar with Zapier, it’s often described as a ‘translator’ between web APIs. This basically means that it allows you to create integrations between multiple apps, to create and automate cross-platform workflows.
So, when we say we’re integrating with Zapier, it actually means we’re integrating with over 2,000 individual apps!
As you can imagine, the possibilities here are truly endless. Speak to a member of our team to understand exactly how this integration might be able to bring value to your project!
Simplicity & Sophistication
Leonardo da Vinci once said that “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” This dichotomy presents a significant challenge, especially at Qmarkets where we’ve developed a reputation for delivering some of the most sophisticated and robust innovation platforms in the world. However, in this product release, we’ve merged sleek design principles with intelligent underlying mechanics, to create a user interface that achieves simplicity and sophistication without compromise.
In addition this release includes features and tools that open up a whole world of possibilities, whether you want to expand your existing innovation management system to tackle a new use-case, or launch a whole new company-wide initiative from the ground up.
If you are interested in upgrading to this release, just let us know. If not – no problem, we’ll be continuing to support previous releases for the foreseeable future. We will soon be hosting a webinar where our product experts will share a much more detailed breakdown of our latest features, including the ones showcased in this document – keep your eyes peeled!
Speak to a Member of Our Team to Learn More about these Exciting Developments!