eParticipation and companies: Listening to those who are important

6. August 2008 – 09:09 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)

It has been discussed on many different occasions how forms of electronic participation can help companies to keep in touch with their costumers, develop innovation and test products etc. The recent project MyStarbucksIdea showed how successful the use of eParticipation can be in such settings (a comprehensive article on this project can be found here (German) and here). Now UserVoice tries to generalise the approach of MyStarbucksIdea and makes the service available to everyone.

You can take a look at this video describing the UserVoice platform and its uses:

The service makes it relatively simple for a company to kick of a dialog with their costumers or employees by implementing a clear process which promises to cover all steps of participation from the initial idea to the implementation.

But a number of questions remain: Can the approach chosen be UserVoice really be the background for a communicative processes involving the development of new ideas or does it best serve as a costumer satisfaction tool? Will especially large companies be willing to use a standard platform or do they need to have more control and original design?

At the least UserVoice shows that eParticipation for companies is a trend which is here to stay. No we have to figure out how to best implement it.

Via Mashable

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