User led innovation (ULI) is an area of great opportunity, particularly in consumer-facing businesses. There are lots of good examples out there, such as IkeaHacker (http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/) and Instructables (http://www.instructables.com/) to name a few. Eric von Hippel of MIT is one of the leading experts in this area, and a great resource for further reading ( http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/tutorials.htm>.

For those of you not as familiar, here's my take on ULI:

"User-led innovation (ULI) has been around for a long time, but only recently has this term entered the innovation conversation.  Defined by customer-led development to improve products or services, it is becoming a well-established innovation approach, especially for consumer-facing businesses.  ULI requires a committed and passionate group of end-users, the abundance of tools and technology that allow consumers to improve or re-purpose existing products, and the willingness of companies to foster the type of environment conducive to this behavior.  The innate advantage to ULI is that the created knowledge is organic and guaranteed to be useful to some segment of the customer base (and ideally impact the major customer segments as well).  The other advantage is its ability to reduce the cost of innovation and new product (or service) development by placing some responsibility on the end-user. The early examples of ULI come from the software industry; existing products and code were constantly being reconfigured in new ways, but has moved to other industries such as food, electronics, hardware, and home furnishings."

Clearly this has the potential for negative impact too, but nonetheless it should be part of the innovation conversation within companies. Any thoughts? Any good success stories that can be shared? Are there any strategies at Clorox to foster this type of innovation?