The consumer market is highly competitive, and companies are constantly looking for ways to outsmart their competitors and produce products that will draw in new audiences. They recognize that often the best ideas can come from outside their internal teams, so they often encourage independent inventors to share their ideas with them. The competitive philosophy is that if you don't take it to them, you might take your innovation elsewhere and make a competing company huge profits. Your ideas are valuable and could prove to be highly profitable, so it makes sense that many companies are more than willing to receive new ideas from external sources and either buy them or create a licensing deal. The submission process may vary from company to company, but they all have an interest in good ideas.