Ideas For New Products Research Articles

Great theses and dissertation start with an intriguing idea

Strategic efforts expended towards identifying and evaluating ideas for a graduate student's thesis or dissertation can help prepare that student for a successful career as either a researcher or practitioner. Generating intriguing and novel ideas can help advance the field of leisure studies, yet the process of identifying great research ideas and questions is largely uncritiqued. This paper presents alternatives to the traditional “extend the research literature” approach, as a means of identifying research questions focusing more strategically on the diversity of information and process of observation and thinking. Graduate students upon beginning their studies can be mentored by faculty to explore ‘what's next’ by capitalizing on their ‘fresh eyes’ to generate novel ideas worth exploring. Some of these methods are akin to how persons and organizations develop ideas for new products and services. Consequently, these methods not only help students going into research-based careers but also those intending to work in professions outside of academia.

Fair play

PurposeCompanies are discovering the power of crowdsourcing as a source of new ideas for products and services. It is assumed that the personal engagement and the continuous involvement with a company’s products or services over a period of several weeks positively affect participants’ loyalty intentions toward the host companies. The research leads the authors to challenge this assumption. In addition to mere participation in crowdsourcing initiatives, the authors argue that perceptions of fairness will explain changes in customer relationship-related consequences such as loyalty, perceived innovativeness and product interest. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analyzed a real-life crowdsourcing contest launched by a leading lighting manufacturer and investigated the impact of two fairness dimensions (distributive and procedural) on participants’ future behavioral and attitudinal intentions (n=121). The analysis was performed with SEM.FindingsThe results suggest that fairness perceptions are significantly related to evoked product interest, perceived innovativeness and loyalty intentions. The analysis reveals that the influence of the fairness dimensions is asymmetric: while distributive fairness can be considered as a basic factor that must be fulfilled in order to avoid negative behavioral consequences, procedural fairness instead is an excitement factor that causes truly positive behavioral consequences.Research limitations/implicationsThe results are particularly relevant for companies launching a crowdsourcing competition under their own brand name, and for broadcasting platforms. For companies with no relations to end-users, these findings may not be as relevant.Practical implicationsOrganizers of crowdsourcing contests should be aware that such initiatives can be a double-edged sword. Fair Play is a must to gain the positive effects from crowdsourcing initiatives for both new product development and the customer relationship. For companies lacking the capabilities to manage crowdsourcing initiatives professionally it is advisable to rely on intermediary broadcasting platforms.Originality/valueThe research is the first to investigate systematically the consequences of fairness perceptions in a real-life crowdsourcing idea contest. The authors demonstrate the asymmetric nature of fairness perceptions on three different outcome variables that are important for the customer relationship.

Stimulating consumers’ creativity through analogical thinking: How can transfer distance and transfer content be matched?

How can customers generate better ideas for new products or new services through analogical thinking? This creativity method comprises two steps: identifying source domains and transferring information from source domains to the target domain. The effect of transfer distance has been extensively studied, but the interaction between transfer distance and transfer content has not yet been considered. In two experiments, we show that the attractiveness of the ideas generated depends not only on the match (or mismatch) between transfer distance and transfer content but also on customers’ expertise in the target domain.

A market testing method based on crowd funding

PurposeThis paper provides a tool for managers to overcome a common paradox in situations of innovation. The paradox occurs when the commercial viability of ideas for new products and services is unknown, making managers loath to invest scarce resources in developing them for fear that they will lose them if the idea is a non-starter. The result is that ideas sit on the shelf, idle and untested. This paper provides a low-cost, intuitive method for determining if a new idea has sufficient commercial potential to warrant investing in its development, thereby resolving the paradox.Design/methodology/approachThe method is based on six marketing mechanisms derived from crowd funding: choosing a target prospect and positioning, creating a prototype, setting a price based on value, locating prospects; getting an address, communicating with prospects; delivering an effective pitch, and measuring results through advance commitments. The method is illustrated using two entrepreneurial cases.FindingsManagers who use the method can validate ideas in the marketplace quickly and at low cost, obtaining the information they need to justify an investment in the research, planning and analysis required for commercialization.Originality/valueThe paper identifies a common but little discussed obstacle to innovation, the development paradox, and proposes a novel method of overcoming it. Market testing is not new, but most known methods do not solve the development paradox because they require a significant outlay of resources to undertake.

Should You Really Produce What Consumers Like Online? Empirical Evidence for Reciprocal Voting in Open Innovation Contests

In open innovation, firms increasingly rely on online consumer votes to evaluate ideas for new products and services. Votes can represent cost‐effective external information about idea quality that can inform and facilitate a firm's task of evaluating and screening of ideas at the early stages of the innovation process. Challenging this perception, we proposed that consumer votes provided in open innovation contests can be socially biased by reciprocal voting. On the basis of theories related to cooperation and social influence, we argued that both gregarious consumers (those who solicit social ties) and consumers who initiate direct reciprocity (those who vote for others) signal a willingness to cooperate that stimulates reciprocal voting from peers. We empirically investigated consumer voting behavior using a unique dataset with information obtained from actual open innovation contests in which consumers could submit their own ideas and see and vote for the ideas of others. We found that both gregariousness and the initiation of direct reciprocity positively influence votes received. Such cooperation pays off for consumers because firms indeed use votes to inform internal idea evaluations. We also found, however, that the votes an idea receives during an innovation contest cannot significantly explain its later revealed quality. Reciprocity may be an effective form of cooperation among consumers, but it has potentially negative implications for firms' evaluations. Our results also indicated that beyond reciprocity, consumers and firms value different types of ideas, which further differentiates their evaluations. Thus, firms should not only be aware of social biases in votes but also account for the diverging idea preferences of customers.

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.

Como pequenas empresas de tecnologia constroem sua base de conhecimento para o desenvolvimento de produtos inovadores

É a partir da base de conhecimento de uma organização que a criatividade e as ideias para novos produtos fluirão. Essa base de conhecimento dá suporte para a capacidade de inovação da empresa. Mas, de que forma pequenas empresas de tecnologia iniciam suas atividades, constrói sua base de conhecimento e se inovam? Responder a estes questionamentos é o principal objetivo desta pesquisa, de caráter exploratório descritivo, realizada em três pequenas empresas de tecnologia que passaram pelo processo de incubação. Na análise e interpretação dos dados foi usada a técnica de análise de conteúdo a partir das respostas obtidas através de entrevistas semiestruturadas, junto aos empresários idealizadores das empresas. Os resultados evidenciaram que à construção da base de conhecimento das três empresas, tiveram influência do modelo de transferência utilizado em parques tecnológicos, onde cientistas acadêmicos concebem ideias de laboratório através de P&D e os desenvolvem em produtos reais.

Measuring Gamification Elementss Effects on User Content Generation: An Empirical Study of Stackoverflowws Two Sided Platformms Big Data

The cornerstone of the new marketing era consists of user generated content. This information is useful for reducing consumer uncertainty, generating new ideas for new products, and managing the customer relationship. To motivate users to generate content, practitioners use video game elements such as badges, leaderboard, and reputation points for user achievements, in an approach called Gamification. To allow Gamification platforms to target their users, I profile user segments by an ensemble method over LDA, mixed-normal and k-mean clustering, and then I develop a model of state-dependent choices of content generating users. This model captures long tail distribution of user heterogeneity by Dirichlet Process, and investigates the effects of fun and social elements of Gamification, reputation points, rank in the leaderboard, and badges (i.e. gold, silver, bronze) on the users’ probabilities to contribute content. I used a big data set of approximately 11,000,000 choices made by 36,000 users across 250 days on Stackoverflow to estimate the mixed binary logit model of users’ content contribution choices. I show that estimating the model on smaller random samples generate biased results. The estimation results demonstrate that users show heterogeneous significant positive and negative inertia, reciprocity, intrinsic motivation, and responses to badges, reputation points, and leaderboard ranks. I found interesting sensitivity patterns to Gamification elements for users with different nationality, which allows the Gamification platform to create targeted messages. The counterfactual analysis suggests that the Gamification platform can increase the number of contributions by making earning badges more difficult.

A better understanding of the role and underlying mechanism of stimulating mental imagery in improving the creativity of “ordinary” users

Stimulating the creative abilities of users involved in co-creation practices is crucial for companies and co-creation platforms. These “ordinary” users, sought after to provide ideas for new products and/or services, are often not particularly creative. Stimulating their creative capacity is, therefore, critical. From this perspective, mental imagery, whose role in the creative process has often been stressed in psychology, appears to play a key role. The objective of this research is to examine whether, by increasing the activity of mental imagery, stimulating mental imagery can increase participants’ creativity. Two experiments confirm the mediating role of mental imagery and underline the positive effects of such stimulation on the creativity of the ideas generated.

Inovatyvus elgesys darbe: kai kurie psichometriniai lietuviškojo klausimyno rodikliai

Inovatyvus elgesys darbe apibūdinamas kaip naujų idėjų kūrimas ir įgyvendinimas, siekiant išspręsti tam tikrą problemą ar pagerinti esamą padėtį kuriame nors organizacijos padalinių. Šiuolaikinėse organizacijose ne tik siekiama į šiuos procesus įtraukti darbuotojus, kai diegiamos atskiros inovacijos, bet ir skatinamas aktyvus jų dalyvavimas nuolat tobulinant darbo procesus ir inicijuojant naujoves. Straipsnyje pristatomas Lietuvos organizacijų darbuotojų inovatyvaus elgesio darbe tyrimas, kurio pagrindinis tikslas – parengti lietuvišką inovatyvaus elgesio darbe vertinimo klausimyną ir pagrįsti kai kuriuos jo psichometrinius rodiklius. Tyrime dalyvavo 283 įvairių organizacijų darbuotojai, metodas – anketinė apklausa, o į tyrimo anketą buvo įtrauktas lietuviškas inovatyvaus elgesio darbe klausimynas ir jo validumui tikrinti parinktos skalės. Remiantis gautais rezultatais galima nurodyti penkias pagrindines inovatyvaus elgesio darbe formas: domėjimasis naujovėmis, idėjų tyrimas ir kūrimas, idėjų išbandymas ir įvertinimas, paramos siekimas ir idėjų įgyvendinimas. Klausimynas atitinka psichometrinėms charakteristikoms keliamus reikalavimus, jo struktūra apima pagrindines užsienio autorių modeliuose aprašytas inovatyvaus elgesio darbe dimensijas (idėjų kūrimą, rėmimą ir įgyvendinimą), taip pat jas papildo domėjimosi naujovėmis ir idėjų išbandymo bei įvertinimo dimensijomis.

Improving the idea selection process in creative workshops through contextualisation

Creativity workshops (i.e. brainstorming, creativity contests and design jams) are increasingly being used by organisations to explore new design spaces and find original ideas for new products or services. The selection of ideas resulting from these creative processes is a key activity for a firm, as it serves as a foundation for time management and decisions on further investments. Moreover, the selection of promising ideas has a more significant impact than the creative process itself as it colours the overall innovation process. We argue that this type of decision is strongly context dependent. That is, the selection process is conditioned by several factors such as the firm's technological and organisational capabilities and its strategy. This implies that a relevant idea for a particular company is not necessarily relevant for another. This paper proposes a context formalisation approach, supported by multi-criteria decision-making analysis tools to evaluate ideas resulting from a creative workshop. This evaluation process seeks to assist the decision-making by requiring success criteria to take into account the firm's context and priorities and give decision-makers the keys to establish a coherent evaluation. Implementation of this approach during a creative workshop validates the appeal of this type of contextualised evaluation. It contributes to the field of practical application of ideas in productive environments. The proposed methodology is illustrated through a case study on the new eco-tourism services for the city of Leticia in the Amazonian region of Colombia with a view to sustainable development.

Rate or Trade? Identifying Winning Ideas in Open Idea Sourcing

Information technology (IT) has created new patterns of digitally-mediated collaboration that allow open sourcing of ideas for new products and services. These novel sociotechnical arrangements afford finely-grained manipulation of how tasks can be represented and have changed the way organizations ideate. In this paper, we investigate differences in behavioral decision-making resulting from IT-based support of open idea evaluation. We report results from a randomized experiment of 120 participants comparing IT-based decision-making support using a rating scale (representing a judgment task) and a preference market (representing a choice task). We find that the rating scale-based task invokes significantly higher perceived ease of use than the preference market-based task and that perceived ease of use mediates the effect of the task representation treatment on the users’ decision quality. Furthermore, we find that the understandability of ideas being evaluated, which we assess through the ideas’ readability, and the perception of the task’s variability moderate the strength of this mediation effect, which becomes stronger with increasing perceived task variability and decreasing understandability of the ideas. We contribute to the literature by explaining how perceptual differences of task representations for open idea evaluation affect the decision quality of users and translate into differences in mechanism accuracy. These results enhance our understanding of how crowdsourcing as a novel mode of value creation may effectively complement traditional work structures.

Scientific research and innovation for human development-the concept of science parks for Universities in Kenya

Sustained competitive innovation is not seldom an outcome of the effort of a single industry or institution. This realization has spurred governments to direct resources to stimulate the emergence and strengthening of research institutions and universities in Kenya Universities in the 21st century aim at providing solutions to challenges facing human society through structured research and the generation of ideas for new products. This paper explores how the established institutions in Kenya have generated research to develop those areas where they are geographically located. Among the questions to be answered by this paper include; where are we in terms of scientific and technological research? What has been done and what remains to be done? Has the research quality and quantity changed since the establishment of several other universities? How well have the Kenyan university researchers disseminated their findings to industrial sector and how has funding affected the generation of new innovations? How individual universities have mobilized resources for the sake of research? The paper too proposes the creation of science parks as a proven method that university researchers in Kenya can use to commercialize their innovations and make industrial products more relevant and competitive as they help the government in creating more jobs. The generalized assumption is that research in science in Africa is faced by almost similar challenges and thus the Kenyan experiences, challenges and solutions can inform other regions in the developing world.

Sharpening Your Creativity Skills: Generating Ideas for New Products

One of the most important skills to possess in the global Internet Age is creativity. People who are creative and innovative will be of great value to any organization that employs them. Moreover, creativity is a valuable skill to have if one wishes to be an entrepreneur. This paper demonstrates numerous ways to develop new products. This paper can be used by instructors who want to use this as a course module in a management, entrepreneurship, or marketing courses to enhance the creative skills of students. It will also be of value to future entrepreneurs who have interest in creating a new product.

Crowdsourcing innovative service ideas

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how negatively worded innovative ideas can be rejected during a crowdsourcing event sponsored by a service firm via an online forum. The goal of an ideation forum is to collect user-generated content in the form of ideas for new products or services. An ideation forum attempts to clarify the “fuzziness” on the front-end of new product development. Design/methodology/approach – A 2 × 2 (satisfied/dissatisfied customers and negatively/positively worded ideas) experiment replicates the effect of mood-incongruent interactions within ideation forums and measures the likelihood for an idea to be buried or selected on the basis of its merit rather than its negative/positive wording. Findings – The results demonstrate that mood-incongruent interactions have different effects on different groups of participating customers. Negatively worded innovative ideas are rated lower by satisfied customers, despite their superior merit. Research limitations/implications – The nature of the experiment shows a high validity, but lacks in reliability. Thus, future research should attempt to replicate this experiment on a larger scale and across different industries. Practical implications – In an open forum where thousands of customers can give a thumbs’ up or down to an idea, merit should prevail over mood-congruency. If the crowdsourcing mechanism cannot be trusted, it puts the burden back on the firm’s review team to promote or review any downgraded innovative idea, which ends up being counterproductive. Originality/value – These findings shed light on the hidden aspect of crowdsourcing when the aim is to find unique, if not radical, ideas for services. Thus, hoteliers and other hospitality and tourism managers should use these findings to design better ideation forums.

Text Montage, a method for encouraging out-of-the-box thinking The design of a brainstorming groupware KOTOBA JAM

This study proposes a new brainstorming method, Text Montage. The term “montage” refers to the famous experiment in film editing by Lev Kuleshov, who demonstrated the effect when people try to interpret the meaning from a pair of images subliminally. In the case of Text Montage, people can make leaps of imagination with neologisms (new phrases) generated in a pair of words. To verify the validity and usefulness of the method, we designed a novel brainstorming groupware KOTOBA JAM. In the usual brainstorming methods, participants find it difficult to come up ideas that are outside the box. KOTOBA JAM, originally a chat-bot system, generates completely unexpected neologisms by combining keywords of the discussed subject with randomly picked modifiers from various designed-modifier selections. The system keeps mumbling phrases as an additional participant in brainstorming sessions. In this study, we focused on the effect of the neologisms, which created in the method of Text Montage, on the activity of idea creation. To increase the probability of inspiration, we designed the neologism-generation system with a linguistic approach. We created a designed-modifier database, which consists of several types of modifiers based on Onomatopoeia, cartoon expression and the theory of inventive problem solving in engineering, TRIZ. We performed a usability testing to observe users’ reactions to each neologism generated by KOTOBA JAM. Then we attempted to discover which types of modifiers increase the possibility of new ideas for products or services. During the usability testing, we discovered tendencies to create new ideas. 1.The modifiers based on TRIZ functioned effectively as a trigger of new ideas for both designers and general users (non-designers). 2. Designers can be inspired even by a randomly selected modifier from a language dictionary. 3.Onomatopoeia was helpful for general users who had limited brainstorming experiences.

Using the Trends of Evolution (TEs) from the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) to Generate New Product Ideas for Optical Fiber Distribution Boxes

In this article, the Trends of Evolution (TEs) originated in the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) are used for the generation of ideas for new products for the telecommunications infrastructure. Initially, the usage of TEs for ideation of new products is described. Then, a case study applying the TEs to an optical fiber distribution box, aiming to improve its usability, is presented. A number of promising new product ideas was generated in a structured way by professionals with no previous experience in using the TEs.

Artistic Interventions That Tilt Organizations: Opportunities and Leadership Challenges

In artistic interventions artists are invited into organizations to work with management and employees on issues that concern them, such as generating ideas for new products and services, supportin ...

Why and When Consumers Prefer Products of User-Driven Firms: A Social Identification Account

Companies are increasingly drawing on their user communities to generate promising ideas for new products, which are then marketed as “user-designed” products to the broader consumer market. We demonstrate that nonparticipating, observing consumers prefer to buy from user- rather than designer-driven firms because of an enhanced identification with the firm that has adopted this user-driven philosophy. Three experimental studies validate a newly proposed social identification account underlying this effect. Because consumers are also users, their social identities connect to the user-designers, and they feel empowerment by vicariously being involved in the design process. This formed connection leads to preference for the firm’s products. Importantly, this social identification account also effectively predicts when the effect does not materialize. First, we find that if consumers feel dissimilar to participating users, the effects are attenuated. We demonstrate that this happens when the community differs from consumers along important demographics (i.e., gender) or when consumers are nonexperts in the focal domain (i.e., they feel that they do not belong to the social group of participating users). Second, the effects are attenuated if the user-driven firm is only selectively rather than fully open to participation from all users (observing consumers do not feel socially included). These findings advance the emerging theory on user involvement and offer practical implications for firms interested in pursuing a user-driven philosophy. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1999 . This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.

RELATIONAL MECHANISMS IN INNOVATION CO-CREATION

Increasingly, producers and customers establish relationships to mutually undertake the development of an innovative product. Consequently, it will be always of interest for an innovative company to know the degree to which different related suppliers are willing to form partnerships by participating in its new product development process. Several managerial implications flow from the link between relationship marketing and innovation processes, ranging from tactical product-related decisions to strategic competitor-related decisions, usually made in a relatively short period of time. Dedicated customer relationship systems track the interactions with customers and improve the flow of ideas for new products. When trying to develop long-term customer relationships, the ability to provide superior value to stakeholders is a must. Through carefully conducted relationships, customers are linked with the innovation company during the entire innovation process, and create a space for mutual understanding, learning and value co-creation. In order to co-create business value through online, also combined with offline innovation-related activities, customer orientation should be implemented throughout the organization – its culture, their systems, including the whole range of interactions.