Interesting that Caribou Coffee has the first three ideas – add $$ to you card, have x amount of qualifying purchases and Caribou adds $ on the card. Free Wi-fi, check. Free Drink on your birthday, check.

Oh, and the fresh ground coffee, Caribou grounds it immediately before it’s brewed! Starbucks grind all their beans in the morning for the ENTIRE day! (And the bean @Caribou is a higher grade.)

So why did it take Starbucks tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to create this when a little competitive analysis or some time on Twitter asking folks what they want would yield the same results?

Susan –

Great points on looking at the competition, surely some competitive analysis would have helped.

I personally haven’t had the chance to visit any Caribou Coffee locations as I am in Canada and not aware of their operations.

While simply asking your customers what they want is a good step, I think the platform they’ve used provides a way to prioritize or quantify ideas with their voting system. Not only that, but hopefully they will discover some unique ideas that some of their customers might suggest that would not be possible through Twitter (the reason being that not everyone has a Twitter account).

I haven’t had a look, but it would be interesting to see what lies in Twitter for Starbucks suggestions. Do you know of any companies that are actively using Twitter to improve their operations?

[...] a new Wikinomics Report Card on Starbucks: “Peering: My colleague David Cameron wrote about My Starbucks Idea on the blog a few months ago. The idea is quite similar to Dell’s Ideastorm, most recently [...]