large Product Update

Qmarkets Fall Product Release 2019: Making Innovation Engagement Easy

Our latest product release offers a wealth of cutting-edge new features, making it easier than ever to organize and allocate tasks, develop ideas for maximum impact, and even gather submissions from your employees without them ever logging into the platform.

At Qmarkets, we know better than anyone that even a single strategic change or optimization can have a huge impact. After all, this is what we’ve been helping our customers to achieve for over a decade. Naturally, this approach also informs our R&D strategy; we invest a lot of time to ensure that we make the right changes and not just the easy ones. Each of our product releases contain intelligent changes targeted at the most critical points in the infrastructure of our platform, and this release is no different. Many of these improvements are so intuitive that our customers will benefit from them without even realizing it. In addition, this release contains some big improvements and new features which are impossible NOT to notice…

Please note that, as always, you don’t have to activate all the new features if you upgrade. You can pick and choose how to enable and expose them gradually to your users.

Discover how these new features and developments – both big and small – can have a dramatic impact on helping your organization deliver repeatable, value-driving innovations.

smart recommendsEngaging Smart Recommendations

We want your users to spend more time engaging with the system in ways that make a bigger impact. To ensure this, we’ve now implemented a ‘smart recommendations’ feature so each user is exposed to the most relevant content for them based on their past activities and behavior. For example, whenever a user submits an idea, our carefully-designed machine learning algorithm will identify other content which might be of interest to that user and immediately prompt them to take a look. This feature acts as a crucial cog in the machine that is your idea management platform, promoting continued user activity in a highly targeted way.

admin 1 fall pic
An example of the personalized content that a user will now see after submitting a comment or idea.

advanced automation

Enhanced Automation – Transitions

When you have an innovation management system that generates hundreds or even thousands of ideas, one of the most critical functions of the tool is its ability to automatically and efficiently ‘filter the gold from the gravel’. One way of doing this is through the existing Qmarkets feature called “Automated Idea Transition” (AIT). While Qmarkets’ software has always allowed you to configure sophisticated AIT rules and conditions, the Fall 2019 product release takes this to a whole new level.

Examples of the different conditions and rules that can be configured around the transition of ideas from one state to another in your workflow.

The Qmarkets platform now gives you the option to configure AIT conditions based on any of the data which is collected during the submission of an idea, or even during its evaluation (i.e. cost of implementation, idea value, type or category of the idea, due dates, and more). Each of these can be implemented alongside any of Qmarkets’ existing AIT conditions, including the number of comments or likes an idea has and other community interaction parameters! This function gives you unparalleled control over the paths that ideas can take through your system, allowing you to define an infrastructure of automation which can save hundreds of hours of manual work.

crowdsourcing iconUpgraded Task Management – Transforming Ideas into Results

Qmarkets has always been committed to not just helping companies generate and evaluate ideas, but also to making sure those ideas actually get implemented and start generating results. For many companies we know that this can be a difficult bottleneck to get through, and so for our Fall 2019 release we focused on making significant upgrades to the ‘task management’ functionality of our system.

Our new and improved task management options make it easier than ever to implement ideas. You can assign tasks to owners, set their priority and due dates, manage their competition status, and have private discussions per task. We take care of everything else.

The user experience for task management has also received a significant upgrade. Utilizing Qmarkets’ ‘Kanban’ visualization interface, tasks can now be dragged-and-dropped between different states in a color-coordinated view.

This new task management ‘Kanban’ view can be used by both the task owner and the moderator to control the status of tasks in the system.

This is relevant not only for the task owners, but also for campaign managers and moderators. These engaging project management features should make it easier than ever to ‘put the wheels in motion’ and make sure your valuable ideas don’t go to waste.

new use caseEasily Add More Use Cases

One of the key strengths and differentiators that Qmarkets offers is the simple ability to support multiple use cases all under ‘one roof’. Many of our customers are already using our various products to support different crowdsourcing and innovation needs within the same system. This includes internal employee innovation programs (Q-ideate); internal continuous improvement or best practice sharing initiatives (Q-optimize); external facing open innovation projects (Q-open); technology scouting or M&A tracking (Q-scout); large scale design thinking initiatives (Q-empathize); and trend management and mapping (Q-trend). Some of our customers have already built their own use cases with our powerful self-admin tools (including patent management, project implementation and impact tracking, plus much more).

In our Fall 2019 release, we’ve introduced a powerful feature that will allow you to increase engagement across the different use cases and make it even more seamless for your end users; interconnectivity.

There are numerous lucrative applications for this new feature. For example, let’s say you were scouting a startup for a potential innovation project (using the Q-scout tool). The new interconnectivity feature would enable you to launch a challenge (using Q-ideate) to collect ideas on ways the company could make use of this startup. Single or multiple ideas gathered from this challenge can then be turned into a best-practice which can be replicated throughout your company.

integration iconIntelligent Integrations

We know how difficult it can be to get employees to adopt a new tool, which is why Qmarkets already offers integration with Yammer, SharePoint, and various other enterprise collaboration tools. However, our R&D experts are constantly looking for new ways to improve our product in a manner that will empower customers. These efforts deliver results across a variety of areas, from exciting new integrations to incremental performance improvements. Here are just a couple of the new developments from our Fall 2019 Product Release.

slack fall 1

With over 10 million active daily users, Slack is one of the fastest growing enterprise collaboration tools on the market. This integration not only allows your users to automatically publish ideas within Slack, but also enables them to submit ideas directly within Slack – rather than logging into the Qmarkets platform. Adding Slack to this suite of integrations will ensure that more customers than ever before will be able to engage their employees without having to onboard them with a new tool.

azure fall 1Qmarkets has received official certification to offer both SSO and user provisioning with Microsoft Azure; the most popular cloud computing service.

experience iconEven More Control for Administrators

As the internationally acclaimed management consultant Peter Drucker once said, “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” In keeping with this maxim, we have implemented a host of improvements to our reporting functionality throughout 2019, including a refurbished reporting dashboard, new user-based statistics, and the cutting-edge ‘Sonar’ visualization tool.

The Fall 2019 release continues in this direction, with new admin features offering the ability to completely customize the dashboard and export the dashboard page to PDF with the click of a button. The option to use intelligent report grouping and sort by user roles (plus much more) is also now available.

We wanted to give your administrators even more control over user profile pages. So now all the admin capabilities for adding any custom field to the user profile can be done by administrators! This could be something practical like ‘Innovation Specialty’ or something personal like ‘Favorite TV Show’. With all our usual field types (radio button, numbers, etc.) the possibilities are endless! These fields are not only shown in the user profile but can also be used within the user search function (when you look for an expert with a certain knowledge set) to limit your campaign to an audience with specific skills.

road iconLooking Ahead – Making the Right First Impression

When one of your users visits your brand-new idea management platform for the first time, you have a window of roughly 30 seconds to convert them into an engaged user. If you don’t succeed, there’s a high chance that this user will close this platform that you’ve worked so hard to create and never open it or think about it again.

This is why engagement is such a crucial aspect of any innovation project. While the Qmarkets system has always received praise for being the most intuitive and user friendly on the market, we want to go the extra mile to ensure every user knows what they should be doing on your system, and how they should do it, from the first moment they log in.

To achieve this, we’re pleased to announce that we will soon be launching an intelligent and interactive AI assistant for your end users. The result of months of hard work, this feature (sometimes referred to as ‘digital adoption’) offers your userbase constant guidance from the moment they begin to use your platform. Whether your user wants to submit their very first idea, or just change their profile picture, the AI assistant will take them through the process from beginning to end.

This is the welcome pop-up which will be shown to end-users the first time they log into the system and guide them through the actions which are most relevant for them.

However, this tool isn’t just for end-users. It is just as useful and effective for power users, who will often be performing sophisticated actions within the system. So, whether you want to generate a new user engagement report or configure our ‘Sonar’ tool to show a unique combination of specific KPIs, you will have step-by-step guidance. Keep an eye out for this feature’s official release in the coming months!

innoicon2All Part of the Plan…

These developments are the culmination of a collaborative process between Qmarkets’ experts, partners, and customers. While individually, some of these features might not seem earth-shattering, each of them represents a necessary and carefully planned step within our overarching product roadmap. Please rest assured that there are many more exciting updates coming soon!

If you are not already familiar with a leading idea management platform like Qmarkets, it might be difficult to understand the full connotations of the features showcased in this product release. To learn more about how these developments could apply to your specific company or project, don’t hesitate to reach out.

We will soon be hosting a webinar in which our product experts will share a much more detailed breakdown of Qmarkets’ latest features, including the ones showcased in this document.

Speak to a Member of Our Team to View Our Fall 2019 Product Release Webinar!

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