Ordinary Users and Creativity: Fostering Radical or Incremental Innovation?

Managers aiming to utilize the potential of involving ordinary users in ideation for innovation currently receive very little guidance from the existing literature as regards how to do this in a satisfactory way. This paper aims to fill this knowledge gap by contributing towards better understanding of how users contribute towards the ideation process of technology-based services, as well as how they may satisfactorily be managed within it. This is accomplished by identifying and investigating different ideation patterns, as well as their effects on the created ideas' characteristics, in the context of mobile telephony services. The paper is based on a quasi-experimental study conducted over a period of twelve days and involving 56 ordinary users and 12 professionals as idea creators. Three different groups of users were used, as well as one reference group of professionals. The paper inductively identifies four different ideation patterns leading to different types of ideas as regards innovativeness (incremental/radical). These are further related to the existing literature. The paper concludes with managerial implications concerning how to manage this type of user involvement in order to obtain ideas that are either more incremental or more radical.