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Companies such as Dell and Starbucks have created public facing websites for gathering ideas from customers. These two examples are powered by Salesforce.com's idea management module, but there are many other options. Facebook is an increasingly popular place for people to interact with companies, so it's a great place collaborate with your customers on their ideas. Spigit just launched its idea management app for Facebook today, but there are others.

The hot idea of the moment for large companies is to outsource their research and development efforts to their customers. Who knows your product better than your most loyal fans? If they can collectively agree on the best way to improve it, it must be good, right? Dell did it with IdeaStorm (our coverage), Starbucks did it with My Starbucks Idea (our coverage), and Salesforce did it with IdeaExchange. Now a new web app called IdeaScale is offering that same basic premise as a packaged service for companies of any size.