Staples’ Quill div. introduces digital suggestion box

Quill Ideas is the name of a new crowdsourcing platform the online division of Staples launched for customers and employees to share ideas in new and interesting ways.

Quill.com, acquired by Staples in 1998, is calling Quill Ideas an online-innovation community that is designed to solicit and implement ideas, review and rank them based on various protocols and then implement those that score the highest. A soft launch that began two weeks ago has already garnered more than 13,000 interactions made up of ideas, votes and comments, according to the company.

“The result, we hope, will be a sustainable flow of ideas, as well as a closer relationship with customers who will have a greater say in how we serve them,” said Quill.com president Sergio Pereira. “We’ve always been fortunate to enjoy a rare level of trust, but we believe including our customers in the process of innovation will further deepen our connection with them, and drive more meaningful new ideas to market.”

Available through a dedicated landing page at ideas.quill.com or in the header on the Quill.com homepage, Quill Ideas will let customers and employees submit and evaluate new ideas. Those that gain traction within the community will be systematically brought to the relevant executives within the company and evaluated regularly by a dedicated innovation team.

Additionally, engagement will be incentivized by applying principles of gamification that will reward regular engagement in a fashion similar to the way badges work on social channels such as Foursquare, while also providing regular evidence that Quill.com is listening, and what they are hearing is making a difference.

Quill.com is headquartered in Lincolnshire, Illinois, and operates 12 distribution centers nationwide.