• Michael Dell Friends His Customers - Fortune Magazine
• Dell IdeaStorm - The Winner of Collaboration & Co-Creation Division - Society for New Communication
• The Idea Exchange -The Gaurdian

You can do PowerPoint decks on innovations all day long, but people have to touch it, see it, and smell it," Stanley says.

Harrah's is trying to make its innovation program less top-down through an Innovation Portal launched in June based on Salesforce's Ideas service, where employees vote on ideas. "We found there's a cluster of employees that are very avid users for submitting ideas and voting on them," says Chris Chang, VP of innovation, but he wants to expand that community.

Harrah's is studying the economics of making the portal available to the public, identifying specific areas and concepts for those idea submissions. Focusing those submissions on specific areas fits a philosophy that Stanley has held since he first took on the innovation role (a job he dedicates Wednesdays to, part time the rest of the workweek). His team established six broad target areas: enabling technologies (such as wireless and radio frequency identification); enabling platforms (cloud computing, service-oriented architecture, anything-as-a-service); "smart" service (self-service kiosks); interactive CRM; next-generation gaming; and expanded channels to reach customers.