Dell's Ideastorm: Customers' Reign

           This week, I really enjoyed reading about the different cases that are real-life examples of how social media is impacting the business world and altering the processes that individuals use to run a company. Because a lot of this stuff is new to me, I was really drawn in by all of the articles because I was able to read about Fortune 500 companies like USAA along with other companies like Starbucks and Dell. Each of these companies’ approaches to using social technologies varies significantly, so it was clear to me that there is a lot to learn from each one of these examples because there is so much that can be done. I chose to blog about DiGangi, Wasko, and Hooker’s study entitled Getting Customers’ Ideas to Work for You: Learning from Dell how to Succeed with Online User Innovation Communities. I was intrigued by the whole concept of Ideastorm mostly because I tend to have a negative attitude toward Dell and I was surprised to hear about this for the first time—I had no idea that the company implemented such a platform to access ideas and feedback from its customers. Also, I have a few questions for you business school students to answer for me in regard to things I am unclear about and cannot come up with solutions to!

            While this is not a new concept, reading this case reinforced for me the fact that, with the growing prevalence of social media, users are innovating and creating content on their own which is inevitably leading to the generation of thoughts and opinions about businesses and their brands.  As a result, companies have to listen to this new content and see what customers are saying about their products and services in order to maintain some sense of control over their image, although they also relinquish a lot of power to their consumers. It makes sense that new business models of openness and sharing are emerging because of this new emphasis on user-generated content that is impacting organizations directly. Rather than trying to squash what is being said about companies, employees are starting to interact with consumers and work with them to improve the company based on the customers’ feedback. Dell’s intent in using Ideastorm was to allow customers to share their expertise and knowledge with one another (as well as the organization) by offering feedback on existing products and proposing new innovations for future products or services.  Dell created this platform, similar to crowdsourcing, to connect right to their customers to determine what the consumers need and want from the company in order to improve their performance. Because Web 2.0 technologies enable ideas, comments, and opinions to spread virally, companies need to react differently to customers than they did in the past. Similarly, they need new strategies for deciding which of these ideas and proposals are worth pursuing. 

At first, when reading about what Dell did to reach out to its customers and include them in the process of creating new products and generating new ideas, I was surprised because I had never heard about it before and thought it was a great idea.  I especially found it interesting that Dell was able to create a means of incentivizing individuals for innovating, without actually giving a prize, but by honoring them on the “Top Idea Makers List.” By providing some sort of recognition for great contributions to a company, Dell enables people to feel valued and appreciated for their work, which is something I found to be a more positive, two-way relationship than other examples I have seen, such as an individual never being acknowledged again after submitting an idea. However, as I kept reading, I realized more and more why there were inherent challenges in this model. Given the platform of Ideastorm, there are many obstacles Dell needed to overcome in order for their efforts to pay off and prove beneficial for the company. Using Ideastorm, the “popularity” of a proposal is skewed, which is something I hadn’t thought of, because there are so many ideas proposed that are similar to one another, so the votes get broken up and the numbers don’t actually prove to Dell that one innovation is much more favorable to the customers than another.  This is what the article called “splinter the vote”—which spreads out the voting amongst proposals for a similar idea, making it difficult to achieve enough votes to capture Dell’s attention.

My purpose in blogging about this reading is to ask you, as business men and women, what you think of Ideastorm and how you would solve the problems faced using this platform.  One of the main concerns I had after reading the article was about how Dell protects the information that customers propose and comment on, because if other companies can gain easy access to the platform, then who is to say that they won’t jump on a great idea before Dell can get to it? A lot of this is foreign to me, because a lot of what I think about is how to run a classroom and how to teach young students, not how to run a business or how to manage a technology platform. That being said, how would you choose what innovations to implement if popularity is so hard to determine? How would you enable innovators to publish their ideas and suggestions without risking becoming too transparent for competitors? How would you make sure that good ideas don’t go unnoticed because of the huge volume of proposals published? How would you feel about relinquishing this much control to your customers to give them the responsibility of generating new ideas and innovations?