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.     

Reciprocity vs. Free‐Riding in Innovation Contest Communities

Innovation contest communities are virtual tools for corporations to integrate external knowledge and creativity into the innovation process. Built on both the principle of competition and the advantages of a collaborative community, innovation contest communities constitute special interaction phenomena. The present study explores how different co‐operation behaviours, namely reciprocal giving, initial altruistic giving and free‐riding, influence the quality of participants' ideas on an open virtual contest platform with more than 2,000 members and more than 4,000 submissions. Our findings show that reciprocity and free‐riding are substantial behavioural elements of innovation contest communities leading to different outcomes regarding quality of submitted ideas. With this study, we contribute to a better theoretical understanding of distinctive types of co‐operation and free‐riding among individuals in the context of open innovation, extending theories of the evolution of co‐operation.     

Creativity and Repetition

In this paper we seek to explore the concept of the ‘new’ through enquiring into the role of the body, thus opening categories that may allow a sensing of the affective ‘new’ in organizing processes. We use various theoretical concepts such as ‘repetition’ and ‘habitual appropriation’ to look at modern dance. We aim to show how the investigation of embodied processes allows us to make links between the old and the new, the creative and the unimaginative, and ultimately may help us to generate an infinite array of creative practices.     

Participation recommendation system for crowdsourcing contests

We propose a novel participation recommendation approach for crowdsourcing contests including probabilistic modeling of contest participation and winner determination. Our method estimates the winning and participation probability of each worker and offers ranked lists of recommended contests. Since there is only one winner in most contests, standard recommendation techniques fail to estimate the accurate winning probability using only the extremely sparse winning information of completed contests. Our solution is to utilize contest participation information and features of workers and contests as auxiliary information. We use the concept of a transfer learning method for matrices and a feature-based matrix factorization method. Experiments conducted using real crowdsourcing contest datasets show that the use of auxiliary information is crucial for improving the performance of contest recommendation, and also reveal several important common skills.     

Taming access control security: extending capabilities using the views relationship

The ‘views’ relationship indicates how an object‐oriented design can be clearly separated into objects and their corresponding interface. This paper uses the concept of ‘views’ in order to achieve full separation between the application and the security policy in the design and implementation. The result is achieved by providing a model for capabilities using ‘views’ that is richer than the traditional capability model. In addition, a distributed access control model is shown to be effective through the use of Secure Object Communication Channels (SOCCs) to allow for secure connections at the abstract object level. This security is applicable in the e‐commerce application domain, bringing security directly to the application abstraction level. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Benchmarking Innovation: A Short Report

A project is reported that benchmarked ‘best practice’ mature organisations, with a base in the United Kingdom, on the processes and practices that they perceive underpinned successful innovation projects. The majority of organisations had director level personnel involved in the innovation process but only three had active involvement of the top management. However, the majority saw the greatest level of innovation being obtained through the use of cross‐functional teams. Five key innovation supports were identified during the benchmarking exercise. These were top management support for, and involvement in the process; the appointment of an innovation champion or sponsor; rewards for innovative behaviours and ideas; and finally a positive attitude to building on creative ideas, irrespective of their source. It is suggested that benchmarking can play a role in identifying best‐practice innovation structures and procedures.     

Tuning Users' Innovativeness During Ideation

Although there is increasing acknowledgement that consumers can contribute useful ideas during the development of innovative services, there has been little empirical examination of how such users can best be managed in order to contribute their ideas to the ‘fuzzy front end’ of new service development. The present study examines the relationship between the nature of user‐created ideas regarding new technology‐based services and the characteristics of the users supplying the ideas. In particular, the study investigates whether users' ideas become more incremental or more radical depending on the users' awareness of technological restrictions and their utilization of use experience. The results show that idea creators with high use experience who are unaware of any technological restrictions tend to produce service ideas that are more radical in nature, whereas idea creators with high use experience who are aware of technological restrictions tend to produce service ideas that are more incremental in nature. The study provides empirical support that, in order to provide innovative ideas, ordinary users involved in ideation must both have a contextual use experience and not be restricted in their ideation by ‘too much’ technology information and restrictions on potential feasibility.     

Crowdsourcing intelligent design

Design intelligence, namely, artificial intelligence to solve creative problems and produce creative ideas, has improved rapidly with the new generation artificial intelligence. However, existing methods are more skillful in learning from data and have limitations in creating original ideas different from the training data. Crowdsourcing offers a promising method to produce creative designs by combining human inspiration and machines’ computational ability. We propose a crowdsourcing intelligent design method called ‘flexible crowdsourcing design’. Design ideas produced through crowdsourcing design can be unreliable and inconsistent because they rely solely on selection among participants’ submissions of ideas. In contrast, the flexible crowdsourcing design method employs a cultivation procedure that integrates the ideas from crowd participants and cultivates these ideas to improve design quality at the same time. We introduce a series of studies to show how flexible crowdsourcing design can produce original design ideas consistently. Specifically, we will describe the typical procedure of flexible crowdsourcing design, the refined crowdsourcing tasks, the factors that affect the idea development process, the method for calculating idea development potential, and two applications of the flexible crowdsourcing design method. Finally, it summarizes the design capabilities enabled by crowdsourcing intelligent design. This method enhances the performance of crowdsourcing design and supports the development of design intelligence.     

In Search of New Product Ideas: Identifying Ideas in Online Communities by Machine Learning and Text Mining

Online communities are attractive sources of ideas relevant for new product development and innovation. However, making sense of the ‘big data’ in these communities is a complex analytical task. A systematic way of dealing with these data is needed to exploit their potential for boosting companies' innovation performance. We propose a method for analysing online community data with a special focus on identifying ideas. We employ a research design where two human raters classified 3,000 texts extracted from an online community, according to whether the text contained an idea. Among the 3,000, 137 idea texts and 2,666 non‐idea texts were identified. The human raters could not agree on the remaining 197 texts. These texts were omitted from the analysis. The remaining 2,803 texts were processed by using text mining techniques and used to train a classification model. We describe how to tune the model and which text mining steps to perform. We conclude that machine learning and text mining can be useful for detecting ideas in online communities. The method can help researchers and firms identify ideas hidden in large amounts of texts. Also, it is interesting in its own right that machine learning can be used to detect ideas.     

Bird in the wire: creativity,resistance, networked citizenships

ABSTRACT

This paper contemplates the extent to which online music-making and sharing practices can be understood as acts of creative citizenship. While the digital is often lauded as a mechanism by which citizens may engage creatively with local or national communities, this paper contends that it may equally represent a means for disengagement with those groups, by instead facilitating participation in the transnational, diasporic communities that have long prospered on the Internet. Possible motivations for this are multifarious and context-dependent, but often signify an act of resistance: against artistic and commercial institutions, against creatively oppressive states, against the cultural isolation of an immediate environment. This paper holds that this type of digitally mediated creative engagement—that which arises as a specific reaction to a perceived inadequacy in one’s civic life—might be best understood through the lens of creative citizenship. In order to assess the relationship between online creative communities and their offline counterparts, it employs Wellman and Castells' notion of ‘networked individualism’, and contextualizes its ideas by referring to recent studies in online amateur music-making in Iran, where the digital is often regarded as a way of circumnavigating the creative oppression of the state.     

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.     

The Creation and Management of Cultural Clusters

This paper analyses two cultural clusters, the Westergasfabriek (WGF) in Amsterdam and the Witte de Withstraat (WdW) in Rotterdam, and evaluates their contrasting creative management strategies. The WGF has to date been fairly successful in creating an attractive mix of different cultural activities, based on the creative potential of the buildings on the site, its image as a cultural centre and the general atmosphere of creativity. The more ‘top–down’ approach of the Local Authority owned but commercially managed WFG has injected new commercial skills and investment into the cluster, and creates the conditions for innovation through managing the mix of creative functions. The WdW, on the other hand, takes a more ‘bottom–up’ approach to the problems of cultural management, and so far the participants have resisted the imposition of formal management. This may allow cultural and commercial functions to co–exist more easily, but, thus far, there seems to be less evidence of innovation.     

Community‐Based Innovation Contests: Where Competition Meets Cooperation

While the principle of competition has long been found to be conducive to innovation, community‐based innovation contests additionally offer the possibilities of interaction and cooperation among participants. This duality makes innovation contests an interesting field for both academia and practice. However, a surge in practical implementations stands in contrast to a still restricted body of academic knowledge in the field. To close this gap, drawing on a boundary spanning perspective, we examine if and how cooperation in the competitive setting of innovation contests leads to innovativeness. Cooperative orientation of contest participants is explored within a community‐based innovation contest run in 2009 at one of the largest universities in Germany. We analyse a complete set of data collected during the contest, data from a follow‐up survey among individual participants (n = 943), as well as video and audio footage from four focus groups. Findings suggest that a very high as well as a very low degree of cooperative orientation result in a high degree of innovativeness, while a medium degree of cooperative orientation results in a low degree of innovativeness. Additionally, this research extends the concept of boundary spanning by identifying two subtypes: proactive and reactive boundary spanning.     

Why and how do middle school students exchange ideas during science inquiry?

Science is increasingly characterized by participation in knowledge communities. To meaningfully engage in science inquiry, students must be able to evaluate diverse sources of information, articulate informed ideas, and share ideas with peers. This study explores how technology can support idea exchanges in ways that value individuals’ prior ideas, and allow students to use these ideas to benefit their own and their peers’ learning. We used the Idea Manager, a curriculum-integrated tool that enables students to collect and exchange ideas during science inquiry projects. We investigated how students exchanged ideas, how these exchanges impacted the explanations they ultimately produced, and how the tool impacted teachers’ instruction. We implemented the tool with 297 grade 7 students, who were studying a web-based unit on cancer and cell division. Among other results, we found a relationship between the diversity of students’ ideas, and the sources of those ideas (i.e., whether they came from the students themselves or from their peers), and the quality of students’ scientific explanations. Specifically, students who collected more unique ideas (i.e., ideas not already represented in their private idea collections) as opposed to redundant ideas (i.e., ideas that reiterated ideas already present in their private idea collections) tended to write poorer explanations; and students who generated their own redundant ideas, as opposed to choosing peers’ ideas that were redundant, tended to write better explanations. We discuss implications for formative assessment, and for the role of technology in supporting students to engage more meaningfully with peers’ ideas.     

A Social Network Perspective of Lead Users and Creativity: An Empirical Study among Children

Generating ideas at the ‘fuzzy front end’ of new product development is risky and has serious consequences for all preceding development stages. One of the currently most prominent techniques in supporting this idea‐generation stage is the lead user approach. Involving lead users in idea generation closely correlates to individual creativity, and both, in turn, to the provision of information in social networks. This study, guided by lead user theory, creativity research and network theory, investigates 16 school‐groups of children examining the relationship between the children's social networks and their resulting creativity and lead userness. In addition, the interplay between lead userness and creativity is discussed and empirically tested. The main result of this study is that children who are positioned as bridging links between different groups in social networks reveal both a high degree of lead userness and a high level of creativity.     

Getting Down to Business: Using Speedstorming to Initiate Creative Cross‐Disciplinary Collaboration

Creative collaborations that cross disciplinary boundaries are essential to innovation. Individuals face challenges, however, in forming new collaborations. Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that the common formats of brainstorming and free‐form networking are insufficient for enabling such collaborations to form. We present a potential solution called speedstorming, a pair‐wise method of creative interaction similar to the round‐robin ‘speed‐dating’ technique. Speedstorming combines an explicit purpose, time limits, and one‐on‐one encounters to create a setting where boundary‐spanning opportunities can be recognized, ideas can be explored at a deep level of interdisciplinary expertise, and potential collaborators can be quickly assessed. A comparison of speedstorming and brainstorming suggests that ideas from speedstorming were more technically specialized and that speedstorming participants were more certain in their assessments of the collaborative potential of others. This paper concludes with a discussion of the method's application in a variety of settings.     

The Development of Creative Capabilities in and out of Creative Organizations: Three Case Studies

This paper describes and analyses how creative organizations develop and use routines and processes to strengthen their creative capabilities. Using an exploratory framework based in resource‐based theory and creativity literature, it focuses on the role of the creative entrepreneur as a key component for organizations developing creative capabilities. The creative entrepreneur or agent builds collaboration, exploits knowledge and enhances relationships in and out of an organization. Drawing on three in‐depth case studies from different sectors (theatre, sports and software), the article expands the idea of creative capabilities to encompass routines and processes in organizations in industries generally not considered ‘creative’. Furthermore, it outlines how the creative entrepreneur is instrumental in developing and using the creative routines so that they form creative capabilities. Based on the analysis, the article discusses creative capabilities, collaboration in the process, and the creative entrepreneur’s role in developing and using them.     

Towards a More Realistic Creative Problem Solving Approach

This paper takes a closer look at the existing multi‐step diamond shaped models for creative problem solving (CPS). A case history of a real‐life technical problem in which CPS techniques were used is our source of inspiration for some new ideas about approaching CPS. We propose three concurrent processes: Content finding, Acceptance finding and Information finding. In concrete in‐company projects, these three processes need to be managed simultaneously, which leads to a fourth overarching process: project management. Content finding is concerned with the process the creative session members are going through based on people's own active knowledge and ideas and on sharing their mental models to get new ideas. Acceptance finding is concerned with the co‐creation of new and additional mental systems that are needed for bringing new ideas into good currency within the existing organization and goes beyond agreement on implementation plans. Information finding is concerned with gathering additional knowledge on the ideas that are not readily available during the session. Finally, Project management is concerned with organizing and leading the creative session and in the embedding of the project into the larger organization.     

Consumers' Creative Talent: Which Characteristics Qualify Consumers for Open Innovation Projects? An Exploration of Asymmetrical Effects

Virtual customer integration and open innovation are considered as appropriate means to improve the success of new product development. However, only when consumers are qualified and motivated to contribute promising ideas and relevant know‐how they are able to add value to a producer's innovation process. In this study, we explore the symmetric and asymmetric impact of various creativity components on consumers' idea generation, concept development, or prototype building abilities as well as interest in co‐creation projects. Our results show that creativity components are of different importance. While some characteristics are needed above certain thresholds to successfully accomplish a certain development task, exceeding those does not necessarily lead to better outputs. Other characteristics improve the creative output only if they exceed specific levels.     

Brainsketching and How it Differs from Brainstorming

Brainsketching is an idea generation technique, based on brainwriting, that uses sketching as the primary means of recording ideas. During brainsketching, participants sketch their ideas individually on large sheets of paper pasted on the wall. After a few minutes, the participants explain their idea sketches, switch places and continue sketching. Usually, about five such rounds of idea sketching take place. In an experimental set–up brainsketching was compared to brainstorming. Linkography was used as a method for analyzing the process characteristics of both techniques. Results show that during brainstorming, participants generated significantly more ideas, and that during brainsketching participants generated significantly more connections with earlier ideas. Also, during brainsketching participants made more incremental connections while maintaining a similar level of ‘wild leap’ connections. Conclusion of this study was that brainsketching does not necessarily provide a better idea generation process; rather, it provides a different process, which may serve different purposes. Some steps towards further development of the brainsketching technique are indicated. Suggestions are provided for stimulating the group to reflect on their ideas. Finally, some suggestions are made for applying the brainsketching technique with groups of non–designers, mainly directed at removing the participants’ hesitation to draw in public.