The future of ideas
One of the most overused quotes about the future is that it is already here, just unevenly distributed (it is usually attributed to William Gibson, a noted American science fiction author). But, one might add, at some point the future tends to cluster.
This is apparently happening with companies hoping to gather ideas from the outside world. After writing about our plan to do this earlier this week, I did some research to see whether there are any examples. And lo and behold there may be a trend. Last week, two noted firms launched idea-gathering sites: Yahoo! and Dell.
These services, called Yahoo! Suggestion Board and Dell Ideastorm respectively, join a raft of others that went live in recent months. Salesforce.com has a site where customers can make suggestions (its software in fact also powers Ideastorm). IdeaSplicing is an open-source effort to gather and discuss ideas. And then there are firms to provide “idea management” software or services such as Crispyideas, Brightidea and imaginatik.
Yet most interesting for our purposes are Yahoo! and Dell. Both services work in essentially the same way. Users first fill out a web form with one box that categorizes the idea (Ideastorm also allows for easy tagging) and another for a brief description (in Yahoo!’s case no more than 1,500 characters). After the “submit” button is clicked, the idea is published on an online suggestion board, where other users can comment on ideas and vote on it. Both services look a lot like , the popular social news site, triggering accusations of plagiarism in the blogosphere.
More important is the question of how popular these sites will be and what kind of ideas they will gather. Both are already populated with hundreds of suggestions (in fact, at the end of this week, there were more than 1,500 on Ideastorm). Yet many are two-liners, constituting customer complaints rather than innovative ideas. “I received more than 30 e-mails from so called ‘procurement agents’ in England”, is one of the most popular entries on the suggestion board for Yahoo! Autos (instead of letting people tag their suggestions, Yahoo! has such boards for each of its services). Ideastorm, so far, seems mostly to be a vehicle for customers to vent their frustration that Dell computers don’t come with Linux or other open-source software pre-installed for free.
These are early days, of course. Such suggestions may well be quite useful for Yahoo! and Dell to gauge what their customers want. They do suggest, however, that we must work hard to ensure that we collect high-quality ideas from a wide spectrum of people. Speaking of ideas: if you’ve got one on how we can do this – fire away below in the comment form.
February 23rd, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Customers will help if they feel some connection to the product or brand. Look no further than the independent user boards (for cars particularly) where users volunteer information that manufacturers can tap for improvements, reporting problems or custom tweaks. The freedom on these sites is just as important — proven by the examples you cited of companies that got flamed when they tried to get “free” ideas and co-opt unhappy people.
Imaginatik is already on the ‘open innovation’ path — where companies are tapping clients, partners or suppliers. But there are a lot of companies out there that just don’t know the customer sentiment about their products, brands, reputations. And they’re in for nasty surprises if they start asking end-users questions that they’d rather not have answered.