One chef at the grill but hundreds of idea cookers

One of the cool things about startup companies is that everyone can (and should) feel ownership of the products.  It's necessary to have product management to make the final decisions efficiently, but everyone can provide input.

One of the ways I try to encourage this is through internal contests.  Every couple of weeks, I ask people to send me emails with answers to different questions.  The contests have quite a bit of variety.  Sometimes I'll ask people to use specific features in one of the products.  Sometimes I'll ask for stories about how they use something or how they would like it to work.

Right now, I'm running a contest where I'm asking everyone in the company for a completely new use for RSS.  It's amazing!  The ideas are extremely creative, and some of them will make great additions to NewsGator products (or maybe totally new products...hmmm)

The reward for winning a contest is some public recognition and usually a gift certificate (though one winner asked for a cowbell...seriously, and I bought it for him).  It's fun and it really helps drive real-world feedback into the products - which is what I think agile is all about.

So how do you leverage your "idea cookers"?