Crowdsourcing Lessons Learned
I just read this article on Wired, from the author of a 2006 Wired article on CrowdSourcing, and a recent book
Nice summary of current corporate activity in this field, with the obligatory mention of Dell's Ideastorm and Starbucks Ideas which are both fantastic examples of companies doing idea-lab initiatives well.
The article mentioned a couple of decent writeups of Dell's lessons learned. Reading them, I thought I'd pass the links to one of my clients, and knowing he's busy, I gave OSX's Summarize Service a go (one of the best hidden Mac functions, I reckon)...pretty decent summaries, actually...
Obviously I'd recommend reading the articles, but here are the links, with OSX's summaries.
Customers in Control at Dell’s IdeaStorm
Summarised by OSX:
The Deloitte study also mentions the importance of having at least one employee whose primary responsibility is managing the community. At Dell, that’s Killian, who drives the site’s technology roadmap and also is its primary evangelist within the company. She’s assisted by an employee whose full-time job is monitoring IdeaStorm. About 40 Dell employees, representing all areas of the company including customer support, engineering and marketing, participate on a team called Communities and Conversations.
In the interest of rolling out the site quickly, Dell launched IdeaStorm without a lot of technological bells and whistles, says Killian. It’s seen a fair amount of tweaks, many prompted by user feedback. For instance, users can now vote ideas up or down, though initially only positive votes were allowed. Though Killian couldn’t offer specifics, Dell is working closely on enhancements with technology provider Salesforce.com.
The Forecast Is for Innovation at Dell’s IdeaStorm
Summarised by OSX:
But that in and of itself won’t make it successful. It’s Dell responding to those ideas and having a closed-loop feedback system. It’s not possible to do that for every single idea, of course. But we are listening and there are key things we can point to. We give a biweekly update on ideas and actions, for instance. It’s not like a suggestion box, where you drop in your piece of paper and walk away. The visibility and the feedback mechanism make this different.
Killian: It’s been an evolution. Dell chose speed to market on this. We wanted to get it out quickly. We didn’t have all the bells and whistles on Day One. So technologically, there have been a lot of changes, and there’s more to come. Specifically, when we launched you could only vote up, not down. The community said, “I should be able to vote down, because silence isn’t telling you anything.” So we took that feedback and worked with it, and now you can vote up and down, and ideas do go negative.
