“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”

–Bill Joy, co-founder, Sun Microsystems

If you’re in business or lead an organization, you’re undoubtedly aware of the always on, always connected culture of participation online. The growing number of people participating in social networks, with social media and generating their own content in the form of blogs, videos and even scrapbooks, is fundamentally shifting how we are connecting with one another, getting our news and alerts, are being influenced by people we trust as we seek before we buy, and increasingly is how we’re making our voices heard when we like, or don’t like, something a company or organization is delivering to us.

Rather than stumble along with rudimentary methods of engaging customers, prospects, employees and other constituents, many organizations are turning toward commercial software vendors who have created a completely new class of hosted software offerings in a category called, “idea and suggestion management.”

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’re staying abreast of the acceleration in companies discovering ways in which they can 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 or they have initiatives in place geared toward learning how their organization can effectively engage people in new and online ways. With enough input from unleashed online participations coupled with smart decision-making within organizational leadership ranks — especially in product management or strategy creation areas — the ability for a company to build and deliver the right products and services goes up dramatically.

One oft-cited example of harnessing the collective intelligence of ones customer base is the Chicago-based t-shirt company, Threadless. The way their business model works is simple: the community of 850,000 people participating online at Threadless “vote” on their favorite t-shirt design (submitted by designers within the community at a rate of around 600 designs per week) and those are the t-shirts that are printed and sold. Threadless is essentially “offloading” their design to the community and enabling the community to be their defacto product managers, deciding on what they (the market) wants.  …  [Read More…]