One of my favorite books is Patricia Seybold's Outside Innovation
For example, the hip online clothing retailer, Karmaloop, gets about 40% of its brand ideas from its customers. Of course, the biggies -- like International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Cisco Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM), Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC) and Dell, Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL) -- also operate idea sites.
In the case of Cisco, the company has established the I-Prize competition so as to find the next billion-dollar idea. The company says it may invest up to $10 million into the winning idea.
So what can your company do to benefit from other people's ideas? Let's take a look:
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