SuggestionWeb Sites One of the most visible open innovation actions these days are suggestion web sites that invite customers and the general public to submit ideas on how to improve a company’s products and services. No rewards are offered and some of these site boast 1,000s and 10,000s of ideas. This may seem awfully seductive: you just make a web site and wait for your customers to submit gazillions of ideas. Don’t.

Open suggestion web sites are an administrative disaster! They give no direction on the kinds of ideas wanted.. They simply ask for ideas. As a result, very few of the ideas received are in any way relevant to your business. Worse, you will see many idea submissions repeated again and again – after all, who is going to review 10,000 ideas to see if someone else has submitted the same suggestion? And a lot of ideas will actually be complaints about your products. But those are not the real problem with suggestion web sites.

The real problem is the 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 ideas. Stop and think how long it would take you and your team to read all of those ideas and determine which are worth taking further? In my experience it will take 5-10 minutes per idea on average. So even 1000 ideas will take over 80 hours, or two working weeks to review! Can you afford that? Moreover, based on my experience, no more than 2% of the submitted ideas will be actionable – and they will be incremental product and service improvements unlikely to have more than a trivial effect on your bottom line.