Even great ideas will die lonely deaths if they aren't nurtured and brought together with the other great ideas that can help them blossom. That may sound obvious. But it's not the way most organizations work. Most companies are divided along operational lines, so people in marketing may never be able to find the IT people with the right ideas about the back-end technology that would make a radically great idea work. So the company pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for the generic knowledge of consultants instead.
Some companies appoint an e-commerce czar, who is empowered to reach across divisional lines.
But too often that power is basically limited to asking the divisional chiefs for favors or loans of staffers or resources. That's not enough. Those ambassadors have to understand the business, as well as the mind-set of the people they're talking to. And they must be able to harvest the ideas of those specialists and figure out what makes sense online. They need the business savvy to know which ideas are important, the technical skills to know what will work and specific permission from top management to go out among the masses and pull together the ideas and the infrastructure to make the best ideas reality.