While this book is focused on internal crowdsourced innovation programs, you may wish to run an externally focused program, which includes prospects and customers. Examples of this include My Starbucks Idea and LEGO Ideas where your inventors and reviewers are not your employees. While these programs are great, they are out of scope for this book, as they require a completely different set of legal requirements (even though you can use the same technology to run them). If you wish to run a program like this, you will need to involve your market research folks, who are already quite adept at talking to your customers, your legal team and your marketing people. You will need to have your inventors and reviewers give up their rights to the idea once they have submitted it, and you can’t provide any kind of guarantee that the ideas submitted, even if they are awesome and your customer love them and upvote the hell out of them, will ever come to light. Additionally, your customer may also use this as an alternative communications channel to discuss (and or complain) about your company, its people or its product. Either way, external programs have a whole other set of challenges, when done right are amazing. But check with those teams I mentioned above if you really want to run an external program.
