Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Idea generation
Any company, be it large or small, goes through challenges at every stage. To beat these
challenges, they need quick minds with an essence of innovation. Looking at the number of
geniuses who do not get placed in well to do firms but have a zeal for that work, we believe
they can contribute to this. The company can create a campaign around their challenge. For
eg. Coke can start a campaign What is true happiness for you? and from the responses they
get from people, the best ideas can be picked for their next marketing campaign. Similarly if
an IT company faces a technical problem, it can create a campaign where all technology
enthusiasts can give suggestions to solve the problem. This crowd sourced data can be
applied by the company in solving the problem.
By doing this, companies will be able get ideas from outside the four walls of their company
and skilled people will be able to utilise their knowledge.
Cases where brands are using idea generation via crowd sourcing to improve their
businesses1. Starbucks- My Starbucks Idea
The company uses this as a hub where consumers can share their ideas related to the
Starbucks brand, like- products, in-store experience and brand involvement.
As an example, below is a screenshot of an entry made by a community member making a
suggestion that Starbucks bring back old blends of coffee.
To sustain the level of engagement via the platform, Starbucks rewards community members
for their ideas with points that are accumulated and listed on the leader board as below-
An interesting section on this site is Ideas in Action. The section provides a listing of ideas
that community members submitted and their status in regards of being implemented by the
coffee house chain.
Below is the list of ideas given by community members. The ideas with a check mark against
them are the ones liked by Starbucks which they have decided to launch in some of their
stores.
2. Lego
As a part of collecting ideas for crowdsourcing, Lego has a dedicated site for fans and
customers to contribute their ideas for product development.
Other users vote for their favourite idea, explaining the reason for liking it and also state how
much they will be willing to pay for it.
If more than 10,000 people support the idea, then it goes to the official Lego review board
who decide whether or not to put it into production.
3. Dell
Dell has a unique and dedicated site called www.ideastorm.com where it invites ideas from
its customers. Below is a snapshot of the site.
Dell claims that there have been more than 20,000 ideas submitted to its IdeaStorm site,
attracting more than 740,000 votes and 100,000 comments. Out of those, more than 550 of
those ideas have been turned into reality.
Below is a glimpse of the ideas submitted by customers and the ones implemented.
Besides this, Dell also has a column for storm sessions where people can interact and discuss
ideas. Discussions are focussed on a dedicated topic and are open for a limited time. Below is
a snapshot of the storm session page.
4. Pepsi Co Lays
When Lays wanted to come up with a new flavour of potato chips, it launched a Do us a
flavour campaign asking its Facebook page followers for ideas. The person with the best
idea, as chosen by Lays received a $1 million as a prize. Users were asked to name the
flavour, pick the ingredients and tell their inspiration.
dynamic and social. Journalists can turn to Storify to curate the relevant
social content from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram etc. for any topic
of their choice.
b. Local citizens, armed with a mobile phone, can assist reporters working
on breaking news with real time images of the event. One company in
particular, Scoop shot is leading the charge on that front. Its an app
that helps phone photographers easily sell their images to news
organizations. The company is encouraging citizen journalism and is
enabling local citizens play an active role in the process of collecting,
reporting, analysing, and disseminating news and information. For
example, reporters turned to Scoopshot to capture the real time
images from the anti-government protests in Ukraine last month
(Exhibit 3). The task received 84 submissions for the request within
hours of the request.
Users: For the aged people or people having sickness of long duration who
cannot stay always in hospital or near to a hospital can use this app.
How to do it ?
For collecting the data from social networking sites, we can use the social
communities that exist on these sites to make doctors and professionals
aware about the motive and can ask them to become member of our
service by providing a little bit of their personal data. For Example:
DoctorsHangout.com is a facebook community.
Similarly we can gather the information about the doctors from the
LinkedIn social networking sites. For example:
patients with rare diseases and conditions. Most people would not know if
they have a rare or unusual disease unless they have already spent
considerable time seeking multiple medical opinions and traveling around
the country to see different specialists.
Reimbursement?
Physicians expect to get reimbursed for the time they spend diagnosing
and treating patients. Whether they review a patient's chart, examine
radiology test results, or otherwise examine a patient, physicians expect
some form of reimbursement. The simplest method would be to provide
direct payment in the form of cash for physicians to contribute their
opinion to a crowdsourcing platform, but the problem with this idea is that
most patients fall back on their insurance plan to cover the bulk of their
medical expenses. Although some interesting reimbursement models are
available for patients who are able to pay cash, this only targets a small
percentage of the population.