Of course you’re paying attention to the always-on, always connected culture of participation online that is fundamentally shifting how we connect with one another, get our news and alerts, are influenced by people we trust and increasingly making our voices heard when we like or don’t like something a company or organization is delivering to us.

If you’ve read Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, Wikinomics by Don Tapscott, or even the seminal book on the topic, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, than you know about the acceleration in companies looking to figure out how to embrace their customer base and ecosystem for fun and profit (but mostly the profit).

In a growing number of conversations I’m having with business leaders, virtually all of them are either engaged in some form of outreach to their customers, prospects, partners and employees and learning how to engage them in new and online ways. With enough input and smart decision-making, the ability to build and deliver the right products and services goes up dramatically. I thought it a good idea to visit this topic now, especially as there now signs the economy is growing and we’re beginning to experience growth in our trend forecasting businesses, typically one bellwether pointing the way in the housing sector.

Best Buy is the “poster child” for this sort of engagement on a host of fronts. From the employee-only BlueShirtNation (now “Mix“) to Giftag to the relatively new and well executed IdeaX, they’re highly focused on driving forward and engaging on as many fronts as possible.

Though Best Buy is quite public with their offerings — along with an unusual level of transparency and engagement — General Mills is also going out with initiatives like MyBlogSpark to engage women who blog (dubbed “mommybloggers”) in order to engage the typical decision-maker in a household and are the ones who usually drive the family nutrition.

Back in March, the site ReadWriteWeb had a guest author, Tom Powell from Co-Innovative, who wrote this fabulous post on the topic and categorized leading idea and suggestion management vendors with an extensive writeup.  …  [Read More…]

Large and small companies around the world are using open Connected Innovation strategies to re-invigorate and accelerate their innovation capacity. This movement goes one step beyond the “submit your idea” generation and allows participants to engage in the product development experience.  Here are three examples of Connected Innovation commercially at work:

• Starbucks built an on-line consumer community called MyStarbucks.com that facilitates open discussion of how to improve the Starbucks experience. Howard Schultz, CEO, claims that MyStarbucks.com has re-invigorated his innovation program by focusing business priorities on customer needs, like free Wi-Fi in all stores

• Threadless.com won Inc. Magazine’s most innovative company award for 2008 for their “customer as company” business model. Threadless has never had a product intro bomb; they only produce what their customers want to buy

• Dell Idea Storm is an example of a social media execution. Idea Storm was launched by Michael Dell with the goal of repairing its customer service credentials, but it changed the way Dell does business.  On Idea Storm, customers, programmers, and the like post their ideas for improvement or enhancement.  Due to the successful use of Connected Innovation strategy, Dell has been able to reduce their product development cycle time by 6 months.

Connected Innovation is the business process of using on-line tools like user communities, blogs, innovation portals and social media to mine, connect, and route ideas, employees, consumers, customers, vendors, brands, and technologies. More specifically, on-line communities, innovation portals, and social media strategies not only create new connections, but also allow the extraction of value from these connections.

My employer, General Mills, has given me the opportunity to explore the Connected Innovation concept. Over the course of the next six months, I will benchmark and research the best practices of leading organizations engaged in building connections to evolve their innovation capacity. My research will also provide a framework for building successful Connected Innovation web sites, both inside the corporate firewall and external to customers in a B-C relationship. I will also be a contributor for Minnov8, sharing insights collected along my journey.  I look forward to the opportunity to interview and collaborate with Fortune 500 companies, social media and innovation thought leaders, and the broader digital community.

During the coming months, you can connect with me here at Minnov8, at my personal blog “Perspectives on Connected Innovation and Collaboration”, and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/djsmith4. I am very interested in engaging in dialogue with you on this subject and look forward to connecting with the broader Minnov8 community.