The October edition of the Harvard Business Journal has a contributed article by Intuit co-founder Scott Cooke on how to build your business using communities. I thought it interesting that he used many of the standard “crowd-sourcing” examples like Skype and Wikipedia but no open source software examples. Given Intuit’s proprietary nature I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
Some tips from Scott that I like:
- Protect experiments from your company’s natural control instincts.
- Let enthusiasts and young employees provide ideas and leadership
- Let users “vote,” early and often.
He makes some other suggestions that I am not sure I agree with in every case but they apparently worked for Intuit. Definately a worthwhile read if you are a community builder.
You might want to check out the companion site to the article, http://usercontribution.intuit.com
It’s a wiki, so you can edit out the “and young employees” part over there, or comment on it, or add open source examples to the site.
Full disclosure: I work at Intuit (as a not quite so young employee) and I worked on the wiki.