What do the crowds know about innovation?

A panel of experts from Dell, IBM, and Cisco gathered to discuss their crowdsourcing techniques and strategies. Dell utilizes an open forum called IdeaStorm to gather ideas from clients, while IBM's Idea Jam is an event-driven technique used for generating conversation threads. Cisco leverages smaller forums to assess the feedback and comments within specific communities, and all three approaches help to gather ideas and trends from the crowd. However, as the number of participants in these programs increases, the ideas tend to become more incremental in nature. The experts emphasize that it's important to set realistic expectations about the results of a crowdsourcing exercise and understand the value of the program beyond just the ideas generated.