To kick off an exciting 2024, we’re highlighting a selection of the powerful features and updates that we launched over the last 12 months. Some of you might have already encountered these in some capacity, but we want to make sure you haven’t missed anything and fully understand the value each update represents.
From streamlined campaign creation to enhanced collaboration tools and game-changing integrations, we’re here to supercharge your innovation efforts. Read on to discover how Qmarkets is revolutionizing the way you innovate in 2024 and beyond.
Unveiling Enhanced Campaign Moderation Functionality
If you want to scale your impact across the company you need not only strong system-admin functionality, you also need to distribute power to your campaign managers in a targeted way. We are constantly enhancing our tool to help campaign managers be more efficient and successful, and here are a few recent highlights:
Quick-Launch Campaign Creator
For a long time Qmarkets has offered one of the most powerful ‘campaign creation wizards’ in the wide world of innovation management. While this is ideal for innovation managers with unique requirements, we realized that it can be a bit overwhelming for some junior campaign managers who just want to use a best practice template without any custom fields. To streamline this process, we’ve created a ‘Quick-Launch Campaign Creator’ which condenses the standard 7-step wizard into a single screen! Naturally this can significantly reduce the time required to define a new campaign, resulting in more campaigns in less time.
Don’t worry – you can fine-tune and add to your campaign at a later date. And of course, our much-loved full campaign creation wizard isn’t going anywhere. This is just an optional alternative that the sysadmin can choose to activate.
Submission Form Field Adjustment
Campaign creators and moderators often find themselves in situations where they need to modify or refine field labels and help texts. Adjusting these elements can significantly improve guidance for submitters, leading to more precise and relevant submissions.
Now, System and Subsystem administrators have the capability to define certain fields as “flexible”. This means campaign creators and managers can adjust the labels and help texts of these fields directly through the campaign settings. This flexibility extends to fields of types such as Text, Number, Date, Link, and User.
Enriched Collaboration & Community Building
Innovation is fundamentally collaborative – it doesn’t happen effectively in a vacuum. That’s why facilitating a free-flowing creative process is at the core of the Qmarkets platform. Your users need to be able to interact and react in a seamless and engaging way, and we’re constantly adding new features to help with this.
‘Innovators Community’ Page
With any enterprise innovation program, you will often have a very wide audience of users that you need to engage and leverage if you want to be successful.The only way you can do this is if you have a birds-eye view of your users, where you can access and filter by relevant criteria. To help with this we recently introduced a new Global User Directory, or ‘community’ page – which serves as a centralized resource for filtering, tracking, and managing your users.
Instant User Invite
While many of our customers are already inviting their entire workforce to join the Qmarkets platform, there are many cases where the system admin might want to quickly invite specific users to sign up on an ad-hoc basis.
This process is now more streamlined than ever before, making it super easy to grow your platform and engage new members to the community. You just add the email address of the new contact and they will receive an email with a link where they can complete their registration and start collaborating. Depending on your system definition, this can include anyone – not just employees but also contacts from outside the company or the organization to contribute as part of an open innovation initiative.
Systemwide Direct Messaging
The Qmarkets platform facilitates communication and collaboration in a wide variety of ways. As a best practice, most of this communication is achieved through a transparent ‘comments feed’, where all the familiar social features are available. To add to this, we’ve now included the ability to send private messages from directly within the platform. This can be very useful, for example when asking a user whether they would like to join the evaluation team for a specific campaign – sometimes a private conversation is better. This new channel opens up a new way for your users to interact, saving time and increasing engagement with your tool on a daily basis.
Comment ‘Liking’
At Qmarkets we’re strong believers in the power of crowd voting. When you need to evaluate large pools of ideas or suggestions, gathering input from the crowd can be an invaluable way to filter the gold from the gravel. One of the challenges some of our customers face is that their ideas receive a large quantity of comments, and it can be difficult to prioritize the comments and find the ones with the most value. To solve this, we’ve now added an intuitive ‘comment liking’ functionality which can be activated system-wide to enhance collaboration.
Automated Profile Field Reminders
It’s important to ensure you have all the relevant information you need about all the users in your system. This is usually achieved during the setup of your platform, through integration with an existing database or tool with the relevant information. However sometimes this information is missing, or you might identify the need for an additional profile field that you didn’t have in the past. Getting users to update this field isn’t always easy, so we’ve added an automated reminder that can be sent to end-users based on your pre-defined criteria. For example, this could be a one-time reminder, it could be with each login, or it could be sent at specific intervals. This will even be added to the ‘to-do-list’ section of the platform for those specific users.
Private Discussions
An unlimited number of private discussions on different topics can be conducted in parallel around an idea. This allows you to keep discussion content in one place, while each discussion is visible only to its invited users. You can customize the fields of the discussion to facilitate an efficient conversation, and even add attachments, due dates, and more.
Catalyst Network Toolkit 2.0
Both of these new features are fundamental to the concept of a ‘Catalyst Network’ that we focused on extensively throughout 2023. The idea behind this is that it’s critical to create a decentralized approach to innovation management if you want to scale an innovation program across a large organization with thousands of employees.
In the past we’ve offered a set of resources to help you onboard your catalysts and campaign managers into the system, but before you get to this point you need to first identify potential catalysts and recruit them. We’re now offering comprehensive support across this full process, including:
- Smart Features to identify and recruit new catalysts, showcase your process, and crowdsource critical needs and challenges
- Dedicated Resources to educate and empower your campaign managers so that you can reduce the load and save precious time
- Best Practices and Guidance to help you build a growth strategy for your program and expand the impact you deliver to the business
- Tailored Services to engage key stakeholders within your organization
When combined with the brand-new moderation features we’re offering, you have everything you need to fully leverage an empowered network of catalysts across your organization and deliver exponential innovation results in 2024.
Implementation Enhancements
When it comes to idea management, sometimes it can be easy to focus too heavily on the ‘fuzzy front end’ of an innovation process. But at Qmarkets we’re focused on helping you to actually deliver results.
Best Practice Adoption
Once you identify a brilliant idea or solution for your company, you need to track its adoption and impact across the business. We recently enhanced our idea adoption functionality to make this process even more effective than before. Now any user can highlight the successfully implemented ideas that they feel have potential for their group/department to implement, before selecting ‘adopt’ and providing feedback.
Monthly Update Tracking
Innovation management is a dynamic process where things are constantly changing and evolving. So for innovation project management to be effective it needs to show a comprehensive picture over time. This new feature makes that easier than ever, giving you a full view of how the forecasted value, risk, and other criteria changes over time. This data can help create a benchmark that you can use to improve your forecasting and analysis, while keeping all stakeholders informed and engaged with the process.
Risk Management
With our risk management feature your users can easily add an unlimited number of risks for each project and track them across the entire idea workflow. This is a highly customizable feature, enabling power users to modify form fields and workflow processes through the Self-Admin panel to cater to specific project requirements. This ensures that various attributes of each risk can be tracked and managed effectively, enhancing the overall chance of your project success.
Highlighted Integration Updates
Integrations are a crucial part of our product roadmap, and something we continuously prioritize to keep pace with the latest enterprise business tools and trends. We facilitate a growing array of connections across many different use-cases to help streamline your innovation process, including ecosystem data integrations, authentication and provisioning, collaboration & communication, PPLM, IPLM, BI, and much more. Here are some of the most significant updates from the past year:
Microsoft Teams
We’re pleased to announce a new feature in our Microsoft Teams integration, making it easier than ever to share and discuss Qmarkets content directly within Teams. Now, users can effortlessly share content from Qmarkets to an individual, group, or channel in MS Teams, enhancing engagement and collaboration.
PowerBI
Although Qmarkets offers a wealth of reporting and analysis tools, we also encourage customers to connect with their own third-party business intelligence tools for specialized analysis, using our automated data export feature. This enables daily synchronization of data from the Qmarkets platform to your preferred BI software through our Rest API capabilities. This use-case is designed for those who wish to blend Qmarkets data with other business-critical insights, creating a comprehensive analysis dashboard. By leveraging our advanced Rest API and PowerApps for authentication, users can now easily generate custom visualizations and reports.
Sharepoint
Another effective way to help scale the reach of your Qmarkets platform is to use our Rest API to share content across different existing channels of communication. One of the most effective options is Sharepoint, where you can now easily showcase elements like “My Ideas,” “Recent Ideas,” and “My Active Campaigns” directly via your company channel.
This update also allows for real-time showcasing of open campaigns from Qmarkets. When a campaign is activated in the Qmarkets platform, details such as the title, description, URL, and image are automatically transmitted to SharePoint. You can then customize these elements with your CSS to ensure a seamless fit with your portal’s design, enriching the user experience.
To 2024, And Beyond
The features and updates shared in this post are all designed to help you maximize the success of your innovation program in 2024 and beyond. However, this is just to catch you up with where we are so far. We have some exciting developments in the pipeline that we will be launching in the very near future!
Our product roadmap is always a collaborative process with our customers, and we wouldn’t be here without you. So thank you to everyone who contributed towards our significant product updates over the last 12 months, and we encourage you to keep sharing your ideas and suggestions with us going forward so we can continue to align our product with your vision.
