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Contact UsIntuit founder Scott Cook’s "The Contribution Revolution: Letting Volunteers Build Your Business" (Harvard Business Review, Oct 2008) tells business owners they should harness the power of user contributions. However, it’s missing one important ingredient: how they should do it.
Cook writes:
First, you must learn how to spot opportunities for creating value from user contributions. Second — and this is the hard part — in acting on these opportunities, you must overcome natural organizational resistance to the idea of relinquishing significant control to people outside the company.
He goes on to call out two companies as doing a good job at crowdsourcing their ideas for improvement: Dell and Starbucks. Both companies rely on Salesforce.com’s Ideas product.
The sites:
Awesome.
Ideas addresses Cook’s first point: identifying an opportunity to create value. Capturing ideas from stakeholders — customers, employees, etc — is key to any business.
And it addresses his second point by having the advantage of being a part of Salesforce.com, an increasingly important system within many organizations. Having the results visible within a trusted and familiar system will help the output seem like less foreign.
Ideas is not the right tool for every user contribution management system, but it’s a good start.
Tags: hbr ideas dell starbucks