The folks at Yahoo have reminded me this morning that there is only one week left to enter the Make It Green contest. The company is soliciting ideas for green products (more than 166 ideas have been filed so far). Community members can vote on the ones they’d like see make onto real store shelves. So far, the site indicates that more than 13,000 people have voted.
The most popular idea so far is this one: An idea for diapers that are made out of plant fibers. Incidentally, you don’t have to say HOW the product will be produced or thing about manufacturing techniques and so on. This is an ideas forum.
Other leading ideas (ranked by community votes) include a solar powered lawn mower, and an ultrasonic mosquito repeller (some competition for Avon’s Skin So Soft!).
The person with the best ideas will earn a share of the product sales, plus $2,500. The contest closes on June 30, and for these last few days, there is no submission fee.
Certainly, a contest like this is no substitute for real research and development activities, but you might want to take a peek to see what your potential consumers would like to see in products from your own company.
Consider that Dell has used blogging to good effect when it comes to making adjustments to its own products. Certainly, it has the right audience (tech types) to use blogs as a tool for this, but something to consider nonetheless. Here’s a link to that forum, which is known as IdeaStorm.
