Companies and their online community join forces to share and generate ideas, find new inspirations, and create new products and services.  

“Crowd Sourcing” and “Co-Creation” are terms that are used to describe this method, whereby social media tools involve customers and other online community members in the innovation process.  

Symnetics posted an excellent presentation about it: 

If you are unable to view the presentation click here 

Some more inspirational examples of “crowd sourcing” and “co-creation” are:
• Starbucks My Starbucks Idea.
• Dell Ideastorm allowing users to suggest and vote on ideas
• Salesforce.com IdeaExchange has generated over 8,300 ideas
• Oracle Oracle Mix. 

Any company : Large , medium or small-size can use the “crowd sourcing” and “co-creation” method to improve their service offering and products in a creative way

 Suggestionbox.com  is an example of a free social media platform that enables this. 

If you would like to contact me, you can do so by visiting my LinkedIn page or emailing me at info@tag-on.com