Use Online Communities to Find Breakthrough Ideas

When Meow Mix wanted to find new ideas, they went out of their own litter box to talk directly to their audience. The bowl of milk they put out to attract cat lovers? An online community.

Many companies are looking beyond old fashioned focus groups to the Web to learn what their target audiences are thinking. And these interactive online groups can be a rich new source of ideas and suggestions.

The challenge, though, is not coming up with new ideas, but rather recognizing, refining and prioritizing true breakthroughs and innovations. The good news is that there are ways to corral all this explosive, creative energy.

Idea Overload
A Google search for “innovation management” turns up more than 23 million results. Research shows that for every “big” idea, there are often 50 mediocre ones—and companies can spend millions turning an idea into an actual product.

So while ideas are abundant, true innovation is still the toughest challenge many companies face. But the need to innovate has never been more urgent. Most retail and consumer product companies are experiencing an increasing rate of market fragmentation. Many corporate leaders understand that innovation in their products, services, operations and communications is what separates the winners from the losers. That’s why the top 1,000 research and development spenders invested $447 billion on new-product development in 2006, according to the Booz Allen Hamilton Global Innovation 1000 report.

What’s more, breakthrough innovations are much more richly rewarded than incremental product improvements. A recent McKinsey study shows that true breakthroughs earn much greater market share than simple line extensions or incremental improvements.

Online communities can generate massive quantities of new ideas. For example, the “MyStarbucksIdea.com” site regularly produces up to 300 ideas per hour and as many as 7,200 ideas every 30 days. Similarly, Dell’s IdeaStorm site has generated more than 9,000 ideas and 71,000 comments from the Dell community to date.

But simply increasing the number of ideas in the pipeline is not enough. Too often, so-called idea management technologies and online suggestion sites have turned out to be little more than vast graveyards for ideas that never see the light of day. Companies may find themselves awash in a sea of ideas with no way to separate the good from the bad or transform raw ideas into real products. An article in Research Technology Management suggested that in a typical ideation process, it can take 3,000 raw ideas to create one commercial success—and finding that one success is no easy feat.

What’s the solution? To effectively drive innovation through online communities, companies should focus on two main goals. First, create a true community of diverse, engaged and invested participants who participate out of a genuine interest. Second, focus the community’s efforts by systematically guiding them to work together to refine and build out winning ideas.