The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2007–2015
Dell's IdeaStorm let customers propose product ideas; the best became real
Dell let anyone post and vote on product ideas; the crowd's best became real products, and the community became a classic case of corporate crowdsourcing.
Dell Inc.
the move
In 2007 Dell launched IdeaStorm, a website where anyone could submit product and service ideas and vote on others. The company reviewed the most-supported proposals and implemented the winners, turning an open forum into a working product-development channel.
Management Science research on the community found that serial ideators — people who posted repeatedly — were more likely than one-off contributors to generate an idea Dell implemented, but their early success rarely repeated once an idea was built.
The model worked because voting did the filtering: customers ranked demand before Dell spent engineering time, and contributors saw their ideas become real, which kept the pipeline full. A 2015 SSRN study documents IdeaStorm as a canonical online open-innovation platform.
why it works
- Crowd posts ideas at near-zero cost to Dell.
- Public voting ranks demand before engineering spends.
- Implemented ideas reward contributors and sustain participation.
- Serial ideators produced the implementable proposals.
what transfers
An idea platform works when customer submissions are a real pipeline, not a suggestion box: public voting surfaces demand, and implemented ideas keep contributors coming back.
what came after
IdeaStorm stayed active into the mid-2010s and became a standard research case for corporate idea crowdsourcing; its central lesson — let the crowd filter, then build — was copied by countless company suggestion platforms.
references
- Crowdsourcing New Product Ideas over Time: An Analysis of the Dell IdeaStorm Community
- Ideation Through Online Open Innovation Platform: Dell Ideastorm
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