Identification of Lead User Characteristics Driving the Quality of Service Innovation Ideas

Research indicates that creative ideas provide the seed for successful service innovations. However, little attention has been paid to understanding idea creation, especially for service innovations. Lead user analysis has been shown to provide the highest potential to create attractive innovation ideas. But which characteristics in lead users are important in this regard is still under‐researched. In the realm of an idea contest, we examine the impact of specific lead user characteristics in driving the quality of service innovation ideas. Our study broadens the understanding of which customers are suitable and should be activated for service innovation idea contests. Using the data of 120 ideas resulting from an idea contest for new online services of soccer clubs, our findings demonstrate that specific lead user characteristics affect the quality of service ideas generated. We find that dissatisfaction with existing services has the highest impact on idea quality. Thus, companies should make use of their complaint management database to invite dissatisfied users to participate in idea contests. The results also show that highly experienced users provide ideas of higher quality. Our findings imply that companies should design closed‐membership idea contests so that only people who show specific characteristics can be admitted.     

Situated cognition and knowledge acquisition research

In the early years of knowledge acquisition research there was considerable discussion about the possibility of obtaining knowledge from experts, based on the ideas of situated cognition. The central idea from situated cognition was that knowledge is only ever created in a context and so cannot be used reliably out of context. These ideas seem to have had little impact on most of the knowledge acquisition research that followed, probably because they seemed to be too negative about the possibilities for knowledge-based systems. This paper suggests that situated cognition can be reinterpreted as making the positive suggestion that if people distinguish between different conclusions in different contexts, they do so because they can identify features that distinguish the contexts. This type of case or context differentiation could be readily integrated with a range of knowledge acquisition frameworks, and experience with Ripple-Down Rules suggests that it provides a very simple way for domain experts and others to easily provide a large amount of knowledge for a system.     

The Performance Effects of Combining Rationality and Intuition in Making Early New Product Idea Evaluation Decisions

New product idea evaluation decisions made by individual development team members during their idea generation activities allow for and may also benefit from the use of both rational and intuitive approaches to decision‐making. Unfortunately, there is a lack of empirical research on whether at all and, if yes, in which temporal sequence the two approaches should best be combined in making single idea evaluation decisions. To start filling this gap in the innovation and decision‐making literatures, this research empirically explores which approach (combination) increases idea evaluation decision‐making quality and speed. To this end, an experiment with product development practitioners was conducted, manipulating the use of either only intuition, only rationality, or combining intuition with rationality in both sequences in making a typical idea evaluation decision. The results show that only one combination, starting with intuitively analysing the ideas and then rationally considering the resulting intuition in making the final decision, leads to both the highest quality and speed. This finding has significant implications for theory and practice and provides ample opportunities for further research.     

User idea implementation in open innovation communities: Evidence from a new product development crowdsourcing community

In collaborative crowdsourcing communities for open innovation, users generate and submit ideas as idea co‐creators. Firms then select and implement valuable ideas for new product development. Despite the popularity and success of these open innovation communities, relatively little is known about the factors that determine the implementation of the user‐generated ideas. Based on research on individual creativity, we propose a conceptual model integrating users' previous experience, idea presentation characteristics and feedback valence to explain the likelihood of idea implementation. We validate our research model with a panel data analysis of 43 550 ideas submitted by 16 360 users in the MIUI new product development community hosted by Xiaomi, a large electronics manufacturing company in China. We find an inverted U‐shaped relationship between users' past successful experience and idea implementation. Furthermore, the length of ideas is positively associated with the likelihood of idea implementation. There is also an inverted U‐shaped relationship between supporting evidence and idea implementation. Finally, we demonstrate the negative effect of positive feedback and the positive effect of negative feedback on idea implementation. These findings offer rich insights to understand the phenomenon of open innovation better. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Relationship between eye fixation patterns and Kansei evaluation of 3D chair forms

Understanding how to induce Kansei (emotion or affect) in consumers through form is critical in product design and development. Conventional Kansei evaluations, which involve subjectively evaluating the overall form of a product, do not clarify the effects of the individual parts of a product on people’s Kansei evaluation. A microscale analysis of eye movement of people looking at product form may redeem this flaw in subjective evaluation. However, simultaneously recording eye movement when people making Kansei evaluation is challenging, previous studies have typically investigated either the relationship between form and eye movement or the relationship between form and Kansei separately. The eye movement of people while performing Kansei evaluations on product forms still has not been clarified. To address this issue, the present study used an eye tracking system to analyze the changes in the fixation points of people performing various Kansei evaluations. Twenty participants were recruited for 8 Kansei evaluations on the form of 16 chairs by using the semantic differential (SD) rating, while their eye movements on these evaluations were tracked simultaneously. Through factor analysis on the data of Kansei evaluations, two principal factors, valence (pleasure) and arousal, were extracted from the 8 Kansei scales to constitute a Kansei plane which is compatible to Russell’s circumplex model (plane) of affect By adopting the factor scores of the 16 chairs as coordinates, the 16 chairs were mapped into the Kansei plane. Further analysis on the eye fixation on the chairs located in this plane concluded the following results: (a) Pleasure had a more significant effect on the participants’ visual attention compared to arousal; the participants required more fixation points when evaluating the chair form that induced displeasure. (b) The participants typically fixated on two parts of the chairs during their Kansei evaluations, namely the seat and the backrest, indicating that seats and backrests are the two primary features people consider when evaluating chairs. The results clarify the effect of various Kansei on eye movements; thereby enable predicting people’s Kansei evaluations of product forms through analyzing their eye movement.     

Ganzheitliche Unterstützung für kreativitätsintensive Prozesse

Creativity is an important precondition of innovation. However, the management of creativity-intensive processes (CIPs) is beyond the scope of standard methodologies for business process standardization and automation because of the contradictory properties of CIPs, which require both process structure and creative freedom. We develop an explanatory design theory based on theoretical constructs from BPM theory, creativity research, and collaboration engineering, with the core component of an integrated IS architecture that facilitates the design of systems providing comprehensive support for CIPs. Automated control of structured processes and support of idea development in groups increase process efficiency and creative performance. Evaluation of a sub-portion of an expository instantiation (CreativeFlow) of the architecture in a laboratory experiment suggests that working with CreativeFlow leads to ideas that are more specific, while working without the tool generates ideas that are more feasible. Further, idea evaluation support of CreativeFlow must be improved in order to increase ideas’ feasibility and relevance. The validity of our theory is derived from a deductive development approach. We indicate limitations and further research.     

Assisting comprehension of animation programs through interactive code visualization

Visual languages have been widely used to help people create animation programs. However, current programming environments lack features supporting efficient code exploration and program comprehension, particularly for understanding relationships among parts of animation programs. In this paper, we present novel interactive visualizations aimed at helping people to understand animation programs. We conducted an empirical study to evaluate the impact of these visualizations on programmer comprehension of the code, showing that our approach enabled programmers to comprehend more information with less effort and in less time. This result is potentially significant because it demonstrates an approach for helping users to explore and understand animation code. We anticipate that this approach could be applied in a wide variety of animation programming tools, which could ease common animation programming tasks that require understanding code.     

Application of evolutionary computation techniques for the identification of innovators in open innovation communities

Open innovation represents an emergent paradigm by which organizations make use of internal and external resources to drive their innovation processes. The growth of information and communication technologies has facilitated a direct contact with customers and users, which can be organized as open innovation communities through Internet. The main drawback of this scheme is the huge amount of information generated by users, which can negatively affect the correct identification of potentially applicable ideas. This paper proposes the use of evolutionary computation techniques for the identification of innovators, that is, those users with the ability of generating attractive and applicable ideas for the organization. For this purpose, several characteristics related to the participation activity of users though open innovation communities have been collected and combined in the form of discriminant functions to maximize their correct classification. The right classification of innovators can be used to improve the ideas evaluation process carried out by the organization innovation team. Besides, obtained results can also be used to test lead user theory and to measure to what extent lead users are aligned with the organization strategic innovation policies.     

How good are ideas identified by an automatic idea detection system?

Online communities can be an attractive source of ideas for product and process innovations. However, innovative user‐contributed ideas may be few. From a perspective of harnessing “big data” for inbound open innovation, the detection of good ideas in online communities is a problem of detecting rare events. Recent advances in text analytics and machine learning have made it possible to screen vast amounts of online information and automatically detect user‐contributed ideas. However, it is still uncertain whether the ideas identified by such systems will also be regarded as sufficiently novel, feasible and valuable by firms who might decide to develop them further. A validation study is reported in which 200 posts from an online home brewing community were extracted by an automatic idea detection system. Two professionals from a brewing company evaluated the posts in terms of idea content, idea novelty, idea feasibility and idea value. The results suggest that the automatic idea detection system is sufficiently valid to be deployed for the harvesting and initial screening of ideas, and that the profile of the identified ideas (in terms of novelty, feasibility and value) follows the same pattern identified in studies of user ideation in general.     

From Creative Ideas to Innovation Performance: The Role of Assessment Criteria

This article aims to make idea screening studies even more relevant to innovation management by coupling a set of assessment criteria so that they can be used for identifying early product ideas with innovation potential. We develop a framework, which integrates the complementary theoretical perspectives from the creativity and innovation literatures. The approach draws novelty and usefulness insights from the creativity literature and combines these with novelty and market potential insights from the innovation literature. The resulting framework encompasses novelty of a product idea and its usefulness to the intended recipients, but with a distinct focus on the value to the firm that can be created through market potential. This set of criteria makes it possible to couple creative ideas for new products directly to potential innovation performance. For the study, industry and market experts made assessments of 106 student‐generated projects; these assessments underline the distinctiveness of the three criteria and support the value of each criterion's independent role in assessing the innovation potential. Two student project cases particularly shed light on the relevance of each criterion and on its unique relationship within the framework.     

Beyond the Generation of Ideas: Virtual Idea Campaigns to Spur Creativity and Innovation

Firms striving to maintain high rates of innovation need a continuous flow of new ideas. This is resulting in the establishment by large firms of IT platforms to generate ideas for innovation, and to encourage employees and customers to participate in innovation contests. However, there has been little published research on the use of IT platforms for idea generation by employees, and it is unclear whether they facilitate in‐house innovation. The purpose is to investigate how firms use IT platforms internally to generate ideas, and how their use contributes to the innovation process in large firms. We rely on data from two collaborative research projects in the automotive industry: Volvo Cars and Renault. We found that both firms used IT platforms as campaigns to promote innovation and to involve employees in the innovation process. The findings suggest that these virtual idea campaigns support innovation in large firms mainly by (1) encouraging employee creativity in idea generation and (2) involving employees and top managers simultaneously in the innovation process. This paper contributes to idea management systems theory by highlighting the importance of virtual idea campaigns for the firm's innovation process, and their dual role.     

Enhancement of digital reading performance by using a novel web-based collaborative reading annotation system with two quality annotation filtering mechanisms

Collaboratively annotating digital texts allows learners to add valued information, share ideas, and create knowledge. However, excessive annotations and poor-quality annotations in a digital text may cause information overload and divert attention from the main content. The increased cognitive load ultimately reduces the effectiveness of collaborative annotations in promoting reading comprehension. Thus, this work develops a web-based collaborative reading annotation system (WCRAS-TQAFM) with two quality annotation filtering mechanisms—high-grade and master annotation filters—to promote the reading performance of learners. Ninety-seven students from three classes of a senior high school in Taiwan were invited to participate in an 80-min reading activity in which individual readers use WCRAS with or without annotation filters. Analytical results indicate that digital reading performance is significantly better in readers who use the high-grade annotation filter compared to those who read all annotations. Moreover, the high-grade annotation filter can enhance the reading comprehension of learners in all considered question types (i.e., recall, main idea, inference, and application). Also, the Cohen’s kappa statistics was used for assessing whether the annotation selected by the high-grade annotation filter is in agreement with the annotations selected by a domain expert. The statistic results indicate that the proposed high-grade annotation filter is valid to some degree. Finally, neither of the proposed quality annotation filtering approaches significantly reduces cognitive load.     

Managing for Innovation: The Two Faces of Tension in Creative Climates

Part of managing for innovation is creating the appropriate climate so that people can share and build upon each other's ideas and suggestions. Yet, there are increasing pressures and potential unproductive levels of tension within organizations. This article points out the distinction between two forms of tension that appear within the research on organizational climates for creativity as well as the conflict management literature. The Debate dimension is described as reflecting a more productive idea tension and the Conflict dimension suggests a more non‐productive personal tension. A series of studies, across multiple levels of analysis, are summarized and a new study is reported in order to highlight the finding that relatively higher levels of Debate, and lower levels of Conflict are more conducive to organizational creativity and innovation. A practical model for the constructive use of differences is shared, along with a few strategies for reducing the negative tension associated with Conflict and increasing the positive aspects associated with Debate.     

A creative idea generation methodology by future envisioning from the user experience perspective

Although several studies have suggested activities of the fuzzy front end (FFE), they focus more on incremental innovation than to radical innovation. This study developed a creative idea generation methodology for the FFE of radical innovation from the user experience (UX) perspective, i.e., UX-driven idea generation methodology. Based on a literature review, a creative idea generation process was developed; it consists of four successive phases (Future envision, Opportunity identification and analysis, Idea generation, and Idea expansion) and one supportive phase (Ideation control). From various research fields, 70 idea generation techniques were collected and classified into phases of the process. To identify implicit and latent opportunities, the future envision method was developed based on a factor combination approach. In assessments by four experts in IT, the ideas generated by the UX-driven idea generation methodology got higher scores than brainstorming approach in novelty and relevance, but not in feasibility. The effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction was greater in the group who used the UX-driven idea generation methodology.Relevance to industry: The idea generation methodology suggested in this study can help indusial designers such as novice designers, analytical individuals as well as intuitive individuals who adhere to initial ideas. The UX-driven methodology can be used as a guideline when selecting an idea generation technique in the FFE.     

Ideas in the Workplace: A New Approach Towards Organizing the Fuzzy Front End of the Innovation Process

This article pinpoints requirements for organizing the fuzzy front end of the innovation process. The author derived the conditions for computer‐aided idea management from benchmarking the fuzzy front ends of several German and European companies and proposes differentiating between general and company‐specific requirements for organizing the fuzzy front end. It is suggested that structuring the fuzzy front end involves low financial investment but highly sensitive and transparent leadership. Using specific properties of ideas in the workplace as springboards, considerations on further new requirements for successful idea management are developed. Placing a particular emphasis on the interface between the idea owner and the idea‐adoption system, an ‘idea types’ model is developed, which defines four different extreme types of employees and their inclinations to solve problems. An extended set of requirements for managing ideas in the workplace as a useful instrument in creation and implementation of idea‐pipelines in companies and in checking software programmes for idea management or the early stages of new product development programmes is presented.     

Social metacognition and the creation of correct,new ideas: A statistical discourse analysis of online mathematics discussions

During asynchronous, online mathematics discussions, new ideas and justifications (knowledge content) and evaluations and invitations to participate (social metacognition) can influence the likelihood of a correct, new idea (CNI) in the current message. Using statistical discourse analysis, we modeled 894 messages by 183 participants on 60 high school mathematics topics on a mathematics problem solving website not connected to any class or school. Results showed that CNIs, justifications, and social metacognition (correct evaluations and questions) in recent messages increased the likelihood of a CNI in the current message. Meanwhile, more experienced participants (who had posted more messages on the website) had more CNIs, and participants who initiated topics had fewer CNIs. Applied to practice, these results suggest that teachers can facilitate students’ creation of CNIs by encouraging them to justify their ideas, evaluate one another’s ideas carefully, and ask questions during online mathematics discussions.     

The differential impact of types of app innovation on customer evaluation

Digital innovation literature seldom considers the effects of innovation from app developers’ perspective. Even when it does, the findings on the value of app innovation are mixed. Based on technological innovation and early-mover advantages literature, we delineate types of app innovation and their impacts on customer evaluations. Our empirical results indicate that adding new business functions to provide new categories of product or service offerings increases customer evaluations, whereas, adding new supporting service functionalities (SSFs) decreases customer evaluations. For followers that “imitate” innovations, the effect of adding SSFs on customer evaluations is negatively contingent on the quality of early-mover apps.     

招贴创意的拓展与整合研究

准确的创意是招贴的灵魂,使受众产生心灵促动和共鸣。文章从以下三方面来阐述美学意义上的创意:1、招贴的属性分析;2、招贴的创意准确性与多样性把握与创意积累探讨;3、招贴创意思维方法的研究。因此得出结论:创意是招贴设计的灵魂,具有内在的气质美,决定着作品的设计感。招贴创意的是通过各种推导方式产生并需要重再推敲和不断完善的过程。     

Crowdsourced idea generation: The effect of exposure to an original idea

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly important approach to pursuing innovation. In crowdsourcing ideation websites, crowd members are often exposed to some stimulus ideas, such as examples provided by companies or peers' ideas. Understanding the effect of being exposed to original stimulus ideas in this context may inform the design of the crowdsourcing process. To test this effect, an experiment was conducted where crowd workers were asked to design a public service advertisement. Depending on the experimental condition, the participants were exposed to an original idea, or a common idea, or no idea. As compared to the absence of exposure, exposure to an original idea decreased fluency, defined as the number of ideas generated by each person, and increased the average originality of ideas generated by each person. By contrast, exposure to a common idea had no effect on either idea originality or fluency. The semantic similarity between the stimulus idea and the first idea generated was higher when the stimulus was common versus original as measured by latent semantic analysis. The implications of these results for research and practice are discussed.