Corante Network contributor Paul Gladen at Chief Innovation Officer comments on Kraft's new open innovation program, through which the company says it will solicit ideas from consumers: "But it still feels like a lost opportunity, and the execution lacks any appearance of innovative thinking - the InnovateWithKraft site is mostly legalese and is essentially a digital 'suggestion box'. As a minimum they could have put a bit more effort into providing some contextual and stimulating information - for example linking to other parts of the Kraft site that provide examples of innovations from Kraft’s history (I only found the link by googling “Kraft+Innovation”). And what about the ideas that don’t match the focus of this program - where’s the blog, where’s the effort to engage customers in dialogue?"
This kind of top-down effort is bound to fail in a world moving toward "crowdsourcing" -- "Everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do R&D." -- which I wrote about this week on IdeaFlow. It looks to me like Kraft is trying too hard to hammer out a customer-driven solution when with much less effort they could simply set up a way to dip their corporate toes into the wellspring of customer-driven idea generation that has spawned the entire new meme (or buzzword, if you will) of crowdsourcing.