Exploring Ideation Patterns among Ordinary Users : The Case of Mobile Telecommunication Services

Managers aiming at utilizing the potential of involving ordinary users in ideation for innovation have at the present very little guidance from the existing literature regarding how to do this in an adequate way. This paper aims filling this knowledge gap by contributing to a better understanding of how users contribute to, and how they could adequately be managed in the ideation process of technology-based services. This is accomplished by identifying and investigating different ideation patterns and their effects on the created ideas' characteristics, in the context of mobile telephony services. The paper is based on a quasi-experimental study lasting over twelve days involving 56 ordinary users and 12 professionals as idea creators. Three different groups of users and one reference group of professionals were used. The paper inductively identifies four different ideation patterns that lead to different types of ideas in regard to their innovativeness (incremental/radical). These are further related to the existing literature. The paper concludes with managerial implications regarding how to manage this type of user involvement in order to obtain either more incremental or more radical ideas.-2-Introduction The service sector and its peculiarities concerning innovation have been increasingly pushed into the centre of economic policy and innovation management research innovation, technology and know-how in the context of economic development and technological change are here of growing interest and are widely discussed on different economic levels (Hipp and Grupp, 2005). In the more recent decays we have seen an increasing growth in technology-services based on technology and normally combining hardware (technology) and software. These services are, for example, embedded in our mobile phones, radio receivers, etc. They are consumed by man-machine-interaction. The underlying hardware is often rather standardized and fixed, whereas the services can be implemented by software in an almost infinite variety (Magnusson, In Press; Reid and de Brentani, 2004). Innovation in this context is often linked to increase user-value by providing services based on an existing, or an improved, technology platform. The knowledge regarding what brings value to the end users – 'use knowledge' – has its main locus among the end-users, whereas the knowledge regarding how to implement the services – 'technological knowledge' – is possessed by the professional developers (experts) in the developing firm. The 'use knowledge' and 'technological knowledge' need to be combined in order to attain innovation. Traditional marketing methods are oriented towards trying to understand the 'use knowledge' by different …