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The Icehouse: BIQ

• The Icehouse BIQ™ (Business of International Quality™ Barometer) uses Brilliant Assessments as its assessment software platform.
• BIQ™ was developed by the ICEHOUSE in collaboration with the University of Auckland Business School to assist business owners take a big picture perspective and identify areas of their business that can be targeted to improve performance.
• The BIQ™ Barometer is an easy to use online tool to help business owners identiify business strengths and opportunities for improvement in under an hour.
• The result is real and practical advice that business owners can use as a guide to accelerate business growth, whilst avoiding the costs of making the mistakes of those who have gone before.

Benefits to The Icehouse BIQ™ from using Brilliant Assessments

As told by Pip Gilbert – Partnerships and Innovations Lead – The ICEHOUSE:

• “We have a high response rate because of the focused and tailored feedback. This is not just another survey, it’s a tool for the customer as much as us.
• Response rate is further improved due to the great user experience and cross device compatibility.
• The results directly reflect the inputs and so the strength of the tool is its reflective nature.
• With clear metrics and needs identification, the customer and advisor can tailor mentoring and training to specific requirements.
• We can be very nimble, altering assessments, or bringing new assessment to market quickly, accurately and with a very high presentation. We can use different graphics and branding on different assessments or different versions of the same assessment.
• We have strengthened our partnerships significantly by providing partners with a branded tool they can offer to their customers, differentiating them in the marketplace.
• We can definitely report to our stakeholders on how we are moving towards our goal.
• With over a thousand responses in the database we can conclusively answer a huge variety of complex statistical questions about the New Zealand business community, including uniquely identifying their particular business strengths and weaknesses.”

More information about BIQ™

The BIQ™ Barometer was born out of our desire to materially grow the New Zealand economy by supporting the success of Kiwi businesses.

“We needed to be able to gauge business success, and our progress towards the goal of enabling 1,000 Businesses of International Quality™ by 2020. The first step was defining what is a New Zealand Business of International Quality™ -i.e. a business that can take on an international market or solidly defend a local position from strong competitors.

The second step was breaking this down into something tangible. Our team consulted industry heavyweights, NZ business-owners, business experts at the University of Auckland, and drew on the expertise here at The ICEHOUSE to build a framework that defines and measures what it takes to be a BIQ™ in New Zealand. The result is a framework of the key areas contributing to the success of any NZ business: Leadership, a Strong Offering, Understanding of Markets, Expert Processes, Governance Support, and Management of Capital.

With these areas defined and refined, we have utilised an easy to use tool that allows NZ businesses to assess where they sit and receive instant feedback. The end game is a hands-on and practical recipe that businesses can use as a guide to accelerate their growth, whilst avoiding the costs of making the mistakes of those who have gone before.”

How it Works in Detail

Pip Gilbert continues: “The BIQ survey comprises of about 186 questions that are divided into 6 sections, each of which has 3-5 sub-sections.  Most of the answers are multi-choice but there are a variety of other answer types too (e.g. text, numeric, dropdown lists etc).  Each selected answer is input to an algorithm to give the respondent a grading for each subsection and section. While this is a very valuable benchmark for them, of even greater value is the detailed feedback that the system generates – made up of advice on the implications of the grading for each subsection, together with specific reaction to the actual answers selected.

We have total control over every aspect of the assessment within the software – the questions, the answers, the feedback, the ratings, everything.  The system is completely “white labelled” so there is no confusion for customers as to who they are communicating with.

We also have several partner organisations who have access to versions of the assessment that have been tailored for their requirements.  This includes specific “white labelling” of the system with their branding.   The system includes sophisticated security to ensure that responses are kept confidential not only to those organisations, but also to specified individuals within them.

The analysis section gives us the ability to report on how we are going against our goal of enabling 1,000 Businesses of International Quality™ by 2020.  We can drill down on the data in any way, including how organisations are improving over time, the alignment of different personnel answering from the same organisations, and by grouping organisations according to their answer to a specific question.”

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