Library Perceptions of Using Social Software Such as Blogs in the Idea Generation Phase of Service Innovations: Lessons from an Experiment

Abstract

This article investigates the use of social software such as blogs to communicate with and to involve users in the idea generation process of service innovations. After a theoretical discussion of user involvement and more specifically user involvement using web-tools with specific focus on blogs, the article reports findings and lessons from a field experiment at a university library. In the experiment, a blog was established to collect service innovation ideas from the library users. The experiment shows that a blog may engage a limited number of users in the idea generation process and generate a useful, but modest amount of ideas.