There are many ways to get that answer whether it be with sales reports from like businesses, surveys and my personal favorite, good old fashioned research.

The following article  follows a large company with wide customer base: Netflix.  They need to accomplish a goal that will help them to sell more products and gain revenue by taking advantage of their own resources (sales reports, in this case customer viewing habits) and employing the help of experts to apply the needed change.

The Crowd Is Wise (When It’s Focused)

A look at recent cases and new research suggests that open-innovation models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators. “There is this misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s not true. It’s not magic.”

“It starts out as crowdsourcing and it is culled to a set of action items,” said Jeffrey T. Kreulen, a researcher at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif.

Open-innovation models are adopted to overcome the constraints of corporate hierarchies. But successful projects are typically hybrids of ideas flowing from a decentralized crowd and a hierarchy winnowing and making decisions.

OPENING the corporate doors to ideas and inspiration from the collective crowd holds great potential, but there are pitfalls, warns Henry Chesbrough, executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. To succeed, Mr. Chesbrough said, a company must have a culture open to outside ideas and a system for vetting and acting on them.

“In business, it’s not how many ideas you have,” he observed. “What matters is how many ideas you translate into products and services.”

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The last quote here is my favorite because it’s true!  Owners, employees and collaborators can talk about new changes, procedures or products forever; but until they take action, all of the discussion and discovery is wasted.