Abstract
This paper identifies technologically reflective individuals and demonstrates their ability to develop innovations that benefit society. Technological reflectiveness (TR) is the tendency to think about the societal impact of an innovation, and those who display this capability in public are individuals who participate in online idea competitions focused on technical solutions for social problems (such as General Electric's eco‐challenge, the James Dyson Award, and the BOSCH Technology Horizon Award). However, technologically reflective individuals also reflect in private settings (e.g., when reading news updates), thus requiring a scale to identify them. This paper describes the systematic development of an easy‐to‐administer multi‐item scale to measure an individual's level of TR. Applying the TR scale in an empirical study on a health monitoring system confirmed that individuals' degree of TR relates positively to their ability to generate (1) more new product features and uses, (2) features with higher levels of societal impact, and (3) features that are more elaborated. This scale allows firms seeking to implement co‐creation in their new product development (NPD) process and sustainable solutions to identify such individuals. Thus, this paper indicates that companies wishing to introduce new technological products with a positive societal impact may profit from involving technologically reflective individuals in the NPD process.
Highlights
Technical solutions pervade everyday life (Majchrzak and Markus, 2013) and have improved life in many respects; for example, information and communication technology (ICT) has made shopping easier (e.g., Amazon), citizens more pow-erful, and information more accessible (e.g., Google) (Geoghegan, Lever, and McGimpsey, 2004)
Discriminant validity was tested by calculating the fit of the single-factor model (x2/df = 3649.739/700; CFI = .518; RMSEA = .105), the five-factor solution (x2/df = 1316.827/680; CFI = .90; RMSEA = .049), and by applying the Fornell–Larcker criterion
The first hierarchical regression model demonstrated that technological reflectiveness (TR) had a significant and positive effect on the number of improvement suggestions that individuals were able to generate (NEIS)
Summary
Technical solutions pervade everyday life (Majchrzak and Markus, 2013) and have improved life in many respects; for example, information and communication technology (ICT) has made shopping easier (e.g., Amazon), citizens more pow-erful (e.g., the Arab spring), and information more accessible (e.g., Google) (Geoghegan, Lever, and McGimpsey, 2004). For more than three decades, sociotechnical research has stressed the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of social and technical systems (e.g., Bostrom and Heinen, 1977; Cohen, 2010; van de Poel, 2003). Technology masterminds such as Bill Gates believe that technology has the power to transform society and solve many of today’s social problems (Gates, 2013). Not all technical solutions serve the higher good. Chips in printers that can supposedly distinguish original equipment manufacturers’ cartridges from clone cartridges and manipulate the printing performance (Anderson, 2008) are not likely to serve higher social goals
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