If you’ve ever dropped an idea into the suggestion box at a store or your workplace, chances are pretty good that nothing ever happened with it. A manager maybe emptied the box at the end of the month, skimmed through the notes, possibly relayed one or two to his manager, then tossed them all into the nearest blue recycling bin.

The time you spent scribbling with a stubby pencil on a quarter-sheet of paper probably went to waste.

Idea flow is a challenge even for companies with a reputation for feeding off employee and customer suggestions. Take Best Buy. The consumer electronics retailer has a culture that encourages employees to speak up when they have thoughts for improving the company. But until recently it hasn’t had a place to collect and organize those suggestions where they wouldn’t get lost in shuffle.

“It was a part of our nature that we weren’t fully taking advantage of,” says Joshua Kahn, manager of emerging media technology for Best Buy.

That started to change a few years ago with the advent of social media, including Blue-Shirt Nation, the in-house network that allows Best Buy employees from around the world to connect with one another.

Now, the company is developing a new tool: a social, virtual, online suggestion box aimed at capturing — and capitalizing on — ideas submitted by its customers and employees from around the world.

The project is called Best Buy IdeaX, and it launched in May 2009. In a few weeks, the company expects to publish an open-source version, allowing anyone else to use the code for free as long as they share improvements with Best Buy and all other users. The release will mark the first time the retailer has ever issued a program as an open-source project.

The bulletin board might be a better analogy than the suggestion box, because notes submitted on Best Buy IdeaX aren’t tucked away into a dark chest. They’re posted on a public website for the whole world to see.

Customers, employees, investors, vendors, activists, competitors, or anyone else with a suggestion can visit http://bestbuyideax.com, type their idea into a text box, add category tags, then click a ‘share my idea’ button to post it.

Once an idea has been added to the site, other users can vote to support the idea and/or add their comments to the discussion. A ‘Popular Ideas’ page lists the ideas that have received the most votes from users.

About 4,600 ideas have been submitted so far. The most popular: “Get rid of those stupid plastic boxes that are way to hard to open,” which has 58 votes.

Offering electronic receipts instead of paper receipts is among the most popular ideas with 53 votes. Free in-store wi-fi has received 36 votes. Other suggestions include doing a better job promoting recycling, giving customers in-store instead of mail-in rebates, and featuring more compact discs by local musicians.

Kahn can’t point to an example yet of an idea that’s gone form IdeaX all the way to implementation. But a few of the more popular ideas cover areas the company was already working on, including electronic receipts and in-store wi-fi. In those cases, IdeaX has helped to affirm “customers or field employees are caring about the same things we’re thinking about at corporate,” Kahn says.

Customers and employees have used the site, although users skew toward employees because there’s been minimal external promotion as of now. Best Buy is currently working with an agency to prepare a campaign to get the word about IdeaX out to the public. In addition to raising awareness and branding the site, the next stage will include coming up with a method for making sure ideas are being connected to the right people within the company.

“What we need to do is operationalize that kind of activity so that the ideas aren’t starting to pool and flood,” says Kahn. “Otherwise, if we don’t get this chain, then we’ll just have stagnation and it’ll feel like a black hole to people who are submitting ideas, and they’ll stop.”

The other, next big phase of the project will be taking it open-source. Kahn was estimating the open-source release would be ready in a few weeks, although an official release date hadn’t been finalized.

Giving away a program may seem like an unusual step for a large, Midwestern retailer, especially an electronic retailer that sells software and applications, but Kahn says the move fits into Best Buy’s open-social strategy of doing business. In part, sharing IdeaX is about “good business karma,” he says. But the program stands to benefit by making it a community project.

“We felt like we stood to gain more by doing it open-source than not. There’s no risk to us. In fact, it’s all upside. When you open source you have other developers, other brains looking at it and figuring out what to do with it, different ways to improve it,” says Kahn. “It’s almost like letting an ecosystem grow around the thing you built, and that actually makes it healthier, where if you put walls up around a thing, you don’t have the same opportunity for collaboration, for learning, for improvement.”

So was there hesitation within the company about sharing an application that might even be used by a competitor? No, not really, says Kahn.

“The features on the site, the way the platform works, all that stuff, there’s value in it, of course, but it’s not the value from which we make money,” says Kahn. “The value from which we make money is the intellectual property that comes from ideas being generated on the site.”

Kahn says he’s heard from a couple people who have expressed some interest in using the open-source version. It’s not the only product of its kind. SalesForce.com, for example, offers a product that can do essentially the same thing. Best Buy built its own because it was able to do so (with BustOut Solutions) for about a tenth the cost of a year of SalesForce’s product.

Small companies or organizations with a do-it-yourself cultures will probably be the ones most likely to take a look at the open-source version (which is called BBYIDX). It’s not an off-the-shelf product. The open-source package includes the code for the engine, but companies will still need a developer to build the design and host and maintain the site.

Originally published Feb. 8, 2010, on BringMeTheNews.com.

It was a fascinating story to report. The retailer is using an internal social network called Blue Shirt Nation, as well as Twitter, to radically change the way it interact with its employees and customers.

My interviews with Best Buy employees left me thinking every news organization in the country would benefit from being more like Best Buy. When communicating with readers and sources, be honest and transparent. Be human.