Ideation, co-creation, crowdsourcing, etc.

Best Buy is expanding its private label offerings based on the “mountains of customer feedback…”

Campbells soup wants your ideas

There’s an ideastorm brewing at Dell

Starbucks wants to shape their future with ideas from outside their walls

There’s clearly a trend here, the question I have is: how long do these companies have before their “idea pools” become efficiently organized outside the org, in their own space on their own terms?

Campbells maybe pays $5,000 if they convert your “idea” into IP

Couldn’t find anything specific within the ideastorm community nor buried in the legalese of the Starbucks initiative.  Interesting to me is the salesforce.com technology driving both Dell & Starbucks.

I think that this will play out on a case by case basis-for the time being.  Dell & Starbucks clearly have enough passionate and involved members who appear (and likely) do participate for intrinsic reasons + they really have the masses organized into a sense of community.  People contribute and share for creative fullfillment, belief, affinity/obligation, reputation, and credibility.  And of course people contribute and share for financial & monetary reward…which is the next step in this game.

My prediction is that as the leaders, influencers, genuine ideators – those proven successful – will separate.  They will embed themselves into a much more functional role within the community and possible even the org.  They will earn income, ownership rights, profit sharing, and become an integral factor within the companies and organizations that they contribute to.  They will replace overpaid executives because their results will prove to deliver more value at a fraction of the price.

In fact, I noticed this one submitted just a few weeks ago:

Until now the participants in Dell IdeaStorm community are rewarded with points for their activities and good ideas but these points are worth nothing.

I think it would be great if the points that people gather here would be exchangable for Dell discount coupons!!!

Yeah.  It’s coming!

But- what service will serve as the platform for these idea communities?  Who will represent the individuals and the masses and how will that contract look like? How will the traditional corp heirarchy look in 2 years?  And the “org chart”? How about 5?  Will we have major corporations whose major shareholders are the collective crowd?  Ineresting stuff indeed…

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