In How to be an Entrepreneur I wrote that black-belt entrepreneurs will move increasingly to place their brands at the hub of a community, or even to create a community around their brand.

They're moving on from the realisation that the best companies create two way conversations with their customers - and getting ever further from the traditional corporate approach of "we'll tell you whatever we want to say, and if you want us to listen you can wait on hold for half an hour and then speak to someone who can't do anything about it" business model.

This evening I've just learned (via TechCrunch) that Dell has launched a community-driven site to develop new products and services.

It's called Dell Idea Storm and although it draws on the work already done by digg, I think it is revolutionary.

Anyone can submit an idea, and then anyone in the community can vote to 'promote' it higher up the list. Dell staff then only need to focus their attention on the highest rated ideas - the community does all the filtering for them.

This combines market research, focus groups, product development, sales promotion, customer service and PR all into one!! It means that when they do implement an idea it's likely to have a customer base ready to buy it.

It also builds a much stronger bond between Dell and its customers.

Most companies would be scared of letting customers post freely like this, and letting them talk to each other. Dell has realised that these people will talk to each other anyway - on other websites - so it might as well be at the hub of the conversation and get some business advantages.

Community is the key to the next stage in developing entrepreneurial businesses. It's something that most corporates aren't able to do well (Dell being a rare exception) - and something that smaller companies could easily and cheaply do to get a competitive edge.

How can you build a community around you? How can you place yourself at the hub of an existing community?