One of my first jobs after leaving University was working for First Direct Bank looking after a project that they called Quest. It was a staff suggestion scheme where everyone in the company was incentivised to submit suggestions of how to improve their products. My job was to work with each internal team, encourage them to submit ideas and then feed through the results into the projects department. During my time looking after the project there were some good wins, particularly around improving the usability of back office systems. Overall though it was really hard to make work. Why? Well it was tricky to identify the ideas that would deliver the biggest benefit, most suggestions tended to be either very difficult to implement or of a small scale and of dubious payback. There were also so many ideas to work through and that was just from the staff, not all the customers as well.
Now I see that the suggestion scheme has come of age with the application of social / web 2.0 principles. I was taking a look at Dell ideastorm today which is based on the salesforce platform. Over 20,000 customers (or potential customers) have voted to standardise power cables for laptops. Which has got to be a very powerful insight for Dell's new product development. Even better though is that the wisdom of crowds has sifted through over 8,900 ideas to choose the products and features that people really want.
Jeremiah Olswang from Forrester has got a write up of the launch of ideastorm here.
This type of approach has to be a big part of the future of new product development, engaging with your community of customers and giving them an opportunity to collaborate and participate in new product features. Easy to knock, hard to pull off. Well done Dell.
UPDATE: Although as others have pointed out that you have to act on the results of all that information if you are going to be taken seriously. I certainly hope that's the case here.
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