If letting external parties help create the product sounds familiar, it should. This is the open source model. Open source projects welcome code contributions from anyone with a good idea and good code, which explains why successful open source products evolve so rapidly. It's no accident that Linux keeps improving, while Microsoft seems trapped in five year release cycles that end up delivering products that find poor market acceptance. Linux allows new participants to offer code contributions, allowing innovative hardware companies to get their products integrated in new releases quickly, new functionality to be rolled out in a timely fashion, and more direct end user involvement via bug fixes and mailing list participation.

As Clay Shirky points out in his new book, Here Comes Everybody, the cost of participation has fallen, thanks to the Internet, by 90+ per cent over the past decade. Not that long ago, it would have been prohibitively expensive to enable direct end user participation in company product planning -- imagine trying to create a custom network, send client software to anyone who desired to participate, and make the results available to all participants in real-time. You're talking millions. By contrast, Dell, shortly after Michael Dell's return to the eponymous company, was able to quickly (and cheaply) put together IdeaStorm, which allowed individuals to submit product suggestions and vote on them as well (shortly after IdeaStorm launched, preloading Linux on Dell products occupied three of the top five items and even today, over a year later, Linux is well represented -- although today's top items address standardizing laptop power cords and making them magsafe like Apple's laptops). There's no question that Dell's IdeaStorm was effective -- and relatively inexpensive, particularly in light of the valuable insight garnered.

So the next time somebody in HR suggests a ropes course offsite to "improve innovation," consider whether you need to invite outsiders, too.