On exploring consumers' technology foresight capabilities: An analysis of 4,000 mobile service ideas

Lead user driven innovation and open innovation paradigms seek to\ninvolve consumers and common people to innovative product development\nprojects. In order to help developers choose ideas that meet the end\nusers' needs, we under-took a massive collaborative research effort and\ncollected 40,000 ideas from 2,150 common people about future mobile\nservices that they would like to use. We inspired each people to produce\ntens of mobile service ideas. In this paper we carry out an analysis for\n4,000 ideas from the idea database. We had a particular interest in\nwhether peoples' ideas can be used in foreseeing the technology\ndevelopment needs. The results show that end users produce ideas that\nare conservative more than novel. Therefore, we claim that consumers'\ntechnology foresight horizon is limited by the existing technological\nbase. The second finding, linked to the previous one, is that the great\nmajority of the ideas that consumers expressed could be realised\nutilizing existing technologies. The implication of this finding is that\nthe idea database should be an interesting source of ideas for service\ndevelopers. The third finding of the study, related to the methodology,\nis that a vast number of ideas can be collected fairly easily but\nanalyzing them cost effectively is a challenge.