Customer-Driven Innovation

By Chris Bucholtz

Back on November 6, we ran a story about Salesforce.com’s new idea incubator, Salesforce Ideas , a product it was selling to customers to allow them to harvest, rank and evaluate ideas from customers, employees and other interested parties. It’s a concept that blurs the edges of where and to whom CRM concepts apply.
Salesforce.com isn’t the only one advocating this concept. Just before the Thanksgiving holiday I was able to sit down with Matt Greeley, the CEO of Brightidea, which offers Webstorm, a product in a similar vein, but with some unique differences. While Ideas is useful for collecting and ranking suggestions, for most companies the next step can be difficult to manage. That involves taking valuable input and translating it into changes in various aspects of the business: not just marketing and sales but also manufacturing.
Brightidea’s differentiator is that it allows customers to track ideas all the way through implementation. “I don’t think it’s enough for companies just to pile up 5000 ideas and then sit on them,” Greeley said. “That just pisses off the customers and the employees.” While Salesforce’s IdeaExchange works because the ideas it generates are taken up by independent software vendors, most companies translate their ideas into their own products and services, so their innovation process is longer and needs closer scrutiny, he said. Brightidea has already collected a number of large customers during its eight-year existence. But it may be smaller businesses that benefit the most from this technology, since it can turn the users of a company’s products into a distributed research department to generate new products.
The implementation stage of Brightidea’s solution allows management to set the parameters on the process, so that innovation doesn’t elbow out other operational concerns. The goal, Greeley said, is to shift from the old, self-contained methods of innovation to a scenario in which the customer is “directly touching and affecting the innovation process,” Greeley said. “The customer can feel like he’s co-creating the product. We think that is a very valuable culture change – allowing the customer to feel as if he has the ability to influence both future products and incremental enhancements to existing products.” If that doesn’t help build customer loyalty, I’m not sure what would.

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