One of my favorite books is Patricia Seybold's Outside Innovation. Her main point is that much of a company's innovation will come outside its walls -- such as from employees, partners, investors, and so on.

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:

Continue reading Entrepreneur's Journal: Striking gold from other people's ideas

Entrepreneur's Journal: Striking gold from other people's ideas originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.