ON EXPLORING CONSUMERS’ TECHNOLOGY FORESIGHT
CAPABILITIES
An Analysis of 4,000 Mobile Service Ideas
Petteri Alahuhta, Pekka Abrahamsson
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Kaitoväylä 1, Oulu, Finland
Antti Nummiaho
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Vuorimiehentie 3, Espoo, Finland
Keywords: Mobile service, technology foresight, user innovation, open innovation, lead-user innovation.
Abstract: Lead user driven innovation and open innovation paradigms seek to involve consumers and common people
to innovative product development projects. In order to help developers choose ideas that meet the end
users’ needs, we undertook a massive collaborative research effort and collected 40,000 ideas from 2,150
common people about future mobile services that they would like to use. We inspired each people to
produce tens of mobile service ideas. In this paper we carry out an analysis for 4,000 ideas from the idea
database. We had a particular interest in whether peoples’ ideas can be used in foreseeing the technology
development needs. The results show that end users produce ideas that are conservative more than novel.
Therefore, we claim that consumers’ technology foresight horizon is limited by the existing technological
base. The second finding, linked to the previous one, is that the great majority of the ideas that consumers
expressed could be realised utilizing existing technologies. The implication of this finding is that the idea
database should be an interesting source of ideas for service developers. The third finding of the study,
related to the methodology, is that a vast number of ideas can be collected fairly easily but analyzing them
cost effectively is a challenge.
1 INTRODUCTION
End users of the products and services are
instrumental for the success of any innovation. They
will determine which products and services will
ultimately become successful and which ones will
fail. The end users’ market behaviour is difficult to
forecast, and indeed history has shown that markets
and end users may take unexpected turns. As an
example, in the mobile service segment the high
popularity of SMS (Short Message Service) led the
operators to forecast that an MMS (Multimedia
Messaging Service) offering would become an
instant hit among mobile phone users as soon as the
new technology was made available. For several
reasons, the adoption rate of MMS has been
significantly lower than the SMS service and in
majority of the mobile service markets the SMS still
keeps dominating the service offering despite of the
opportunities that the newer technology offers.
Von Hippel (1986, 2005) has been one of the
first authors to promote the use of consumers’
technological foresight capabilities to the fullest
extent. In his seminal work on lead user driven
innovation in 1986, he argues that in the area of
high-tech product development lead users are
actually ahead of the market place and possibly
possess innovative ideas about the product or
technology that they use. Von Hippel (2005) argues
also that lead users may be quite willing to share
their product related innovations freely and that
these ideas are often commercially attractive.
Chesbrough (2003) popularized the concept of
open innovation to distinguish from the traditional
model of innovation, which he calls a closed
innovation model. Chesbrough (2003) argues that
external R&D (Research and Development) can
create significant value and the internal R&D is
needed to claim a part of this value. His open
innovation model relies on building the business
model first. He argues that companies should learn
169
Alahuhta P., Abrahamsson P. and Nummiaho A. (2008).
ON EXPLORING CONSUMERS’ TECHNOLOGY FORESIGHT CAPABILITIES - An Analysis of 4,000 Mobile Service Ideas.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business, pages 169-176
DOI: 10.5220/0001910001690176
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

to increase the effective usage of a company’s IP
(Intellectual Property) either by selling it or offering
it outside of the company’s boundaries by other
means. Also, learning to acquire IP from companies,
individuals and user communities (Baldwin,
Hienerth & Von Hippel 2006) outside, whenever it
fits the business model, bears significance in
producing innovative products and services. In
Chesbrough’s (2003) terms the open innovation
model forms a new imperative for creating and
profiting from technology.
Based on Von Hippel’s and Chesbrough’s
concepts of lead user driven innovation and open
innovation, the involvement of consumers in the
development of future mobile services would seem
to be of paramount importance to guarantee the
continuous feed of innovative products and services.
Little is known, however, to what extent the end
users are capable of forecasting into the future (Un,
Price 2007). Thus, the potential technological
foresight capability of a mobile terminal user
remains an area of research with little results.
When asked about future technology, we have a
tendency to rely on forecasts made by information
and technology research companies such as Gartner
(www.gartner.com) and Standish Group
(www.standishgroup.com/). Their predictions on
future service development, builds upon technology.
Markets and end-users are known to take unexpected
turns. They may be even reluctant to adopt new
technologies or services. behaviourTherefore it can
be asked, how accurately are technology research
companies able to predict future services, as the
diffusion of services is dominated largely by other
factors than those related to any particular
technology.
In order to help companies and developers meet
the needs of the growing number of mobile terminal
users, we undertook a massive collaborative research
effort and collected 40,000 ideas from 2,150
ordinary people about future mobile services that
they would like to use. We inspired people not to
think about the technology, but to express their
concrete needs. Moreover, we did not request a
single or few ideas from these people. Rather, we
motivated people to come up with 30 or more ideas
even if they would feel them to be either “silly” or
not realistic in their minds.
In this paper, we report the results from a study
where 4,000 ideas from the database were chosen for
a technical scrutiny. We are particularly interested in
understanding the technical foresight capability of
an end user. We also wanted to know if by analyzing
users’ ideas, one could identify specific technology
development needs. Therefore, we paid particular
attention to identifying possible technology related
obstacles in front of successful mobile services, such
as limitations in human technology interaction or in
communication capabilities. As context awareness
has been advertised as a technology to bridge the
shortcomings of the mobile HCI (Cheverst et al.
2000, Korpipaa et al. 2006), we also analyzed to
what extent the ideas suggest that this would be a
desired development trend.
The paper is organized as follows: the next
section outlines the research design of the study
focusing on research methods, data collection and
analysis. Also, the outline of the Idea Movement
initiative that the present researchers took alongside
with the principal high level results of the Idea
Movement itself is presented. This is followed by
the results of the analysis and a brief discussion of
the implications for the mobile service business and
research. The paper is concluded with final remarks.
2 RESEARCH DESIGN
This section discusses the issues related to research
design. We will first introduce the research method
and settings, and then we will briefly describe the
data collection and means of analysis of the material.
Finally, we will give some examples of collected
ideas stored in the database.
2.1 Research Method and Settings
This study is an explorative research on the mobile
service needs. The phases of an innovation process
have been discussed in the literature (e.g., Koen et
al. 2002). There is a strong need to better understand
the role and potential of end users in foreseeing the
technology development needs. The problem has
also been discussed by Un & Price (2007). In order
to explore the possibilities of ideas, we launched a
national research project called the Idea Movement.
The project started in the beginning of 2006. We set
the goal to collect at least 35,000 ideas for mobile
applications straight from the citizens, and to make
these ideas accessible for everyone by publishing
them in the Internet. Giving companies,
organizations and individuals the opportunity to
build on the ideas of thousands of people, we aim to
accelerate the development and commercialization
of new mobile services.
2.2 Data Collection and Analysis
Ideas were collected systematically in 31 workshops
and events organized around Finland. Altogether
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2,150 people participated in the events. The majority
of the participants were university students,
schoolchildren and elderly people. Workshops were
also organized in schools, at workplaces and even in
a shopping centre. Furthermore, there was a
possibility to post ideas on the Idea Movement
website, and about 200 people communicated their
ideas in this way. Table 1 summarizes the division
of ideas according to different age groups.
Table 1: Distribution of ideas in the Idea database.
Age group
(years)
number of
ideas
Proportion of
ideas
7-12 1,800 4%
13-16 6,500 16%
17-19 4,300 10%
20-50 21,000 51%
50-90 4,300 10%
Unclassified 3,100 8%
Total 41,000 100%
Each workshop was kicked off with a short
introduction to idea generation techniques, followed
by brainstorming sessions both individually and in
groups. At the beginning of each event we asked the
participants to produce ideas about a given topic, but
we also accepted ideas that did not match the
original subject of the particular brainstorming
session. We instructed each participant to produce
20 ideas individually and then form groups of 3-4
people. The ultimate goal of idea generation was that
each group would deliver together 100 ideas, or
more.
Ideas are 1-2 sentence descriptions of a mobile
service idea or an expression of a need that they
think could be fulfilled utilizing mobile technology.
The progress of a brainstorming session has been
described in more detail by Leikas (2007).
Idea analysis was carried out in two phases. First
a group of five reviewers did a qualitative analysis
of 2,000 ideas so that we got an understanding of the
potential of the ideas. According to the reviewers’
subjective opinion, each idea was classified into one
of the following four categories: Excellent,
Interesting, Conventional and Not a mobile service
idea.
We also carried out an analysis of the technical
aspects of the collected ideas in order to get an
understanding of the technologies that are required
for implementing these ideas. Also, the essential
constraints that may currently prevent the
implementation were considered.
For the analysis three technology areas (access
technology, context information, human-technology
interaction) and major technical constraints were
identified. Furthermore, we explored what kinds of
integrated or interconnected devices were proposed
to be part of mobile services. The analysis was
carried out by reviewing a selected portion of the
ideas and categorizing them based on the defined
categories. Each idea was classified based on its
most obvious way of implementation. For this paper,
we selected 4,000 ideas (i.e., 10% of all ideas) for a
detailed inspection. The selected dataset consists of
2,000 ideas produced by high-school students (the
age group of 17-18 years) and 2,000 ideas from
university students and employees (the age group of
20-50 years).
2.3 Data Examples from the Idea Base
The themes of covered a large variety of different
topics including Public transportation, Travelling,
Work and Learning, Culture and entertainment,
Hobbies, Wellbeing and health, Shopping and
service, Family, Friends and relatives, Household
management and living and Everyday activities.
In order for the reader to comprehend the nature
and type of the mobile service ideas, we have listed
below some ideas classified to the four suggested
categories: Excellent ideas, Interesting ideas,
Conventional ideas and Not a mobile service idea.
These categories were created in an early phase of
the analysis in order to quickly have an exploratory
view of the ideas in the database.
Examples of ideas classified as Excellent are:
• Warning if parking time is running out.
Possibility to automatically buy or order
additional parking time.
• Location-based filtering of incoming calls. E.g.,
No work-related calls at home.
• Locating of friends (if they allow).
Examples of Interesting ideas are:
• In a rally, one can get information about the
condition of a car. A spectator will know if the
car is going to break down.
• Service that tells you how strong the punch in
your glass is.
• Opportunity to order "good explanations" when
coming home late.
Some ideas classified as Conventional are:
• The controlling of a home automation system
by a mobile handset. Being able to switch on/off
lights, heating, etc.
• Message from library if a new book by your
favourite author is available.
• Service for getting current hit music to your
mobile phone.
ON EXPLORING CONSUMERS’ TECHNOLOGY FORESIGHT CAPABILITIES - An Analysis of 4,000 Mobile
Service Ideas
171

Finally, examples of ideas that are not a mobile
service idea include:
• Mobile phone making a cup of coffee
• 3" nails inside the mobile phone
• Rat trap
3 RESULTS
In this section we will describe the results of the
technical analysis of 4,000 ideas. At first the
application categories are introduced, followed by
technical constraints in five major areas suggested
by the literature.
3.1 Application Categories
We first classified mobile service ideas into eight
distinct categories based on the idea clusters
identified in the data and had one category for
miscellaneous ideas. The results have been
summarized in Table 2.
Table 2: Distribution of ideas in application categories.
Category Description Total
Information pull Retrieving information for
some purpose (possibly
based on location).
30%
Information
push
Receiving information
automatically (possibly
based on location).
14%
Locating
(persons /
objects)
Locating or following
some (nearest) person or
object.
9.2%
Communication Social discussion channel. 7.0%
Service request Ordering a personal
service (possibly based on
location).
4.7%
Content
production
Producing content. 4.3%
Payment Using mobile device as a
means of payment.
4.0%
Identification Using mobile device as a
identification device.
3.4%
Others Applications that do not fit
into other categories.
24%
According to technical analysis people see
mobile services largely as an information channel,
which can be used when ever they need to know
something. 30% of ideas fall into this category.
muchSignificantly fewer ideas proposed automatic
information delivery to users’ terminals. Only 14%
of the ideas proposed push services such as
advertisement. Locating missing objects and persons
representrepresented 9.2% and communicating, for
example, with social communities 7% of ideas.
Service requests (4.7%), mobile content production
(4.3%), payment (4%) and identification (3.4%)
representrepresented a perhaps surprisingly low
popularity in the analyzed set of ideas.
24% of the ideas fell into the category others. We
think this indicates that there is a versatile set of
activities in everyday life where mobile technology
could provide value to the users.
3.2 Technical Constraints
In this paper we want to explore the nature of user
innovation ideas from the technical viewpoint. We
are particularly interested in what kinds of
technologies are needed to realise the ideas that
users have proposed. More specifically we are
interested in
a) what seems to be the main constraints for services not
being developed,
b) what communication and access technologies are
required for the ideas,
c) what kind of context information, if any, is required
for services that users propose,
d) what are the challenges in Human Technology
Interaction (HTI) technologies, and
e) what kinds of integrated or interconnected devices are
required for the ideas.
3.2.1 Analysis of Major Constraints for
Adoption of Mobile Services
One of the main findings of our technical analysis is
that there are no major technical constraints in
developing most of the mobile service ideas into
actual mobile services for people. However, we can
pinpoint some constraints that are quite typical for
mobile services and well known by the literature.
Even if these constraints are not immediate road
blocks for services, they weaken the user experience
so much that eventually users may not start using the
services in the first place or they stop using the
services because of the poor experience.
In Table 3 technical factors that may hinder user
experience have been summarized. Small screen size
and low bandwidth are perhaps the most important
constraints in mobile services. Other factors that
make it difficult to realise some of the ideas are low
processing power, high power consumption of the
terminals and a limited amount of memory available
in the terminal.
Some of these constraints will be overcome in
time. Such , such as bandwidth, processing power
and amount of memory. Screen size and power
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consumption, however, are harder obstacles for
developers. The trend towards extensive multimedia
communication requires as large a screen as possible
and higher processing power that leads to higher
power consumption.
Table 3: Major technical constraints identified in collected
mobile service ideas.
Category Description Total
Screen
size
The user interface requires a
large screen.
3.5%
Bandwidth A lot of network traffic occurs. 2.9%
Processing
power
Processing power is especially
important.
1.0%
Amount of
memory
A lot of multimedia or other
memory expensive data is
handled.
0.96%
Battery
duration
A lot of power is needed. 0.91%
Touch
screen
The user should be enabled to
interact with the application by
touching pictures or words on
the screen.
0.32%
Keyboard The user must type lots of text. 0.30%
It is also to note that the total percentage of ideas
having major technical constraints is very low. In
other words, technology is not the main constraint in
implementing most of the ideas.
3.2.2 Analysis of Required Communication
and Access Technologies
In the technical analysis we wanted to consider what
communication and/or service access technologies
are required for realizing the ideas. Table 4
summarizes the analysis of required access
technologies.
In the table we can see that the vast majority
(67%) of foreseen services can be realizedrealised
utilizing existing access technologies such as
GSM/GPRS (2G) or 3
rd
generation cellular networks
(3G). 13% of ideas required short-range
communication solutions, such as Bluetooth or Near
Field Communication (NFC). Quite few services
really required such communication technologies as
satellite communication, cell-casting or a
combination of different communication
technologies.
During the time of collecting the ideas (in 2006)
there were quite lively debates about the promised
break-through of mobile-TV. Our study did not
support the need of these technologies and it seems
that users have not adopted to broadcasting-type
access technologies beyond FM-radio-receivers in
their mobile handsets.
Table 4: Required access technologies.
Category Description Total
3G Text and multimedia
based services.
67%
2G Mainly text based
services.
60%
Short-range
communication
Communication over a
few meters or by touch.
(Bluetooth, NFC)
13%
WLAN Mainly indoors or in areas
with lot of people.
1.5%
Broad-casting Sending same information
to all cell phones.
1.1%
Satellite Worldwide access may be
needed everywhere
including mountains and
seas.
0.47%
Combination of
two or more
access
technologies
Non-trivial combination
of multiple access
technologies.
0.44%
Cell-casting Sending same information
to all cell phones within a
base station.
0.22%
3.2.3 Requirements for Human Technology
Interaction (HTI) Technologies
Earlier in this paper we discussed the major
technical constraints when considering the
implementation of mobile service ideas.
Table 5: Human Technology Interaction technologies
required in mobile service ideas.
Category Description Total
Image / Video
analysis
Extracting information from
image or video.
1.8%
Speech
synthesis
Ability to produce sound
that resembles human
speech.
0.86%
Augmented
reality
The idea that an observer's
experience of an
environment can be
augmented with computer
generated information.
0.76%
Speech
recognition
The ability to recognize and
carry out voice commands
or take dictation.
0.69%
Audio analysis Extracting information from
audio.
0.49%
Gesture
recognition
The ability to recognize
human gestures, usually
hand motion.
0.22%
Gait pattern
recognition
The ability to recognize
gait.
0.02%
ON EXPLORING CONSUMERS’ TECHNOLOGY FORESIGHT CAPABILITIES - An Analysis of 4,000 Mobile
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HTI-technologies do not seem to be a major
obstacle in the track of creating mobile services.
However, we know that poor usability and
restrictions in HTI-technologies weaken the user
experience (Hartmann, Angeli & Sutcliffe 2008).
Developers are investing lots of effort creatingto
create solutions thethat make mobile interaction
more intuitive. We wanted to look at a number of
HTI-technologies in order to see if end users
generating service ideas are in need of novel HTI
technologies. Table 5 summarizes the analysis.
Based on the analysis we can say that users
either can not imagine or do not seem to hunger for
services with novel HTI capabilities, such as speech
synthesis, augmented reality, speech technologies or
gesture recognition.
3.2.4 Analysis of Context Information
Required for Services Ideas Users
Proposed
The use of context information in mobile services
has been an active research discipline for already a
decade. Researchers and developers have proposed a
number of different context-aware mobile services
and applications.
Table 6: Context Information required in mobile service
ideas.
Category Description Total
Location Location of the user or some
object.
25%
Time Time that is relevant in a
non-trivial way.
4.7%
Activity What the user is doing. 1.8%
Identities of
nearby people
Identities of people that are
close-by.
1.8%
Emotion /
Mood
How the user or some other
party feels.
1.6%
Our analysis, summarized in Table 6, confirms
the fact that location seems to be the most valuable
and versatile context information to be used in
mobile services. Even 25% of service ideas require
location information. Time (4.7%) is another
obvious context information. Identifying the activity
of the user, the social context (people nearby) or an
emotional situation do not seem to be as important
factors for the proposed mobile service ideas.
3.2.5 Analysis of Needs for Integrated or
Interconnected Devices
We also wanted to look at what kind of integrated or
interconnected devices people wanted to have in
their mobile terminals. The results are summarized
in Table 7.
Table 7: Needs for integrated or interconnected devices.
Category Description Total
Meters/Sensors Measuring a property. 6.8%
Controllers Controlling a device. 3.3%
Others Mobile phone being or
using other devices.
9.9%
In the analysis, we identified two clear
categories, namely Meters/Sensors and Controllers.
The first category stands for ideas that have some
kind of sensing or measuring functionality. Ideas in
this category include, for example, a mobile phone
with a step counter or an alcometer. The second
category includes ideas related to controlling other
devices using a mobile phone, for example, the
possibility to open a home door for someone from
distance using a mobile phone. In addition to these
categories, we found a versatile set of ideas
proposing that a mobile phone includes or uses
another device, such as a laser pointer or a projector.
4 DISCUSSION
Literature claims that people may have unique,
interesting and potentially commercially attractive
ideas about technologies (Von Hippel 2005).
Literature also holds that bright ideas may emerge
from inside an organization as well as from the
outside (Chesbrough 2003). We challenged these
arguments and collected a vast amount of mobile
service ideas from students, working-age people,
school-children and elderly people. We argue that an
in-depth analysis of this material will provide us
valuable insight about users’ everyday needs and
wishes concerning mobile and ubiquitous
technologies and services.
In this paper we were particularly interested if
user-generated mobile service ideas could be used as
a tool in foreseeing the need for technological
development. The reasoning behind this idea is as
follows: if users would propose needs or ideas that
cannot be realised using existing technologies, it
would create a potentially attractive target for
technology developers.
The discussion is organized around three
practical implications of the study. First, we claim
that it is relatively simple to collect a large amount
of data about people’s ideas or needs. The real
challenge is to analyze these ideas cost effectively.
Second, we claim that the adoption of a vast variety
of mobile services is not primarily limited by
missing technologies. In fact, the majority of all
ideas can be realised with existing technologies. And
third, we claim that people are not likely to propose
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very futuristic service ideas. On the contrary, they
are tightly limited to existing understanding of the
capabilities of mobile systems. We could say that
people are hindered by the technological frame of
today.
4.1 Consumers Freely Share their
Ideas
During the course of the Idea Movement project we
have seen that collecting a large amount of idea
material is not an overwhelming task. People were
willing to participate and reveal their ideas in the
brainstorming sessions that we organized in various
schools, universities and companies. In these events
we offered participants refreshments, such as coffee
and snacks, but the participants were not offered any
financial or material rewards for participation. This
seems to confirm the claims that economic factors
are not the primary source of motivation for people
who share their ideas (Lüthje 2004). In the
beginning of the process of collecting these ideas we
thought that IPR and ownership of the ideas would
become an important topic of discussion.
Surprisingly, only a few people raised the issue.
Perhaps this was due to the policy to publish all the
ideas, and the fact that these ideas are mainly very
short descriptions of a need or service – not detailed
business ideas.
Collecting a large amount of ideas is not as
difficult as it may sound. Instead (cost) effective
processing of these ideas is much greater challenge.
We have tried various automated systems for
analyzing the data, but they do not seem to work
very well. This is mainly due to the free format of
ideas. The same idea can be expressed in various
ways with different kinds of language, i.e., using
standard language, dialect, spoken language or even
slang.
An interesting avenue to pursue for processing
these ideas is to distribute the workload to large
groups of people using the Internet. In this approach
persuading and motivating people to work on the
ideas requires further consideration. We have done
some experiments on carrying out Internet based
analysis, but the results fall out of the scope of this
paper and thus will be published in the future.
4.2 95% of the Ideas can be
Implemented
In our study it became evident that the vast majority
of mobile service ideas can be implemented using
existing technologies. Technical components of
mobile services are typically a mobile terminal
(mobile phone) with a browser or a dedicated
application, wireless network access and a server
with service specific functionality.
According to our analysis only 5% of proposed
mobile service ideas had major technical obstacles.
One such technical obstacle is, for example, small
screen size, which is particularly problematic in
navigation and multimedia services. Another
technical challenge is limited bandwidth of mobile
access. Bandwidth limitation causes troubles in
multimedia intensive services such as video-
conferencing and multimedia streaming. Power
consumption and battery technology may also limit
possibilities in few service ideas.
The development of technologies takes some of
the current obstacles into history. Some of the new
mobile terminals from various vendors have much
larger displays than a couple of years ago. Also, new
network technologies are provided with improved
bandwidth and the computing power will increase,
as well as the size of memory.
In fact, we could argue that all proposed mobile
service ideas could be realised using existing
technology, but the user experience and cost
structure might not be quite satisfactory for
commercial deployment.
4.3 Consumers’ Technology Foresight
is limited to Existing Technologies
and Paradigms
While we suggested that approximately 95% of all
ideas can be realised with existing technologies, it
can be said that this method and project produced a
large amount of valuable data for companies in quest
of new services right now. Even though researchers
and developers may be interested in technology
forecasts, this material may not readily reveal the
future developments of mobile technologies..
Instead, we suggest that extensive pre-processing
may enable the discovery of novel patterns not yet
identified. We should try to identify some “weak
signal” phenomena from the set of ideas instead of
stronger trends. These stronger trends tend to be the
conventional ideas that are familiar to everyone.
Conservative ideas may be due to the lack of
consumers’ understanding on the new possibilities
of mobile technology or that the majority of users
are so tied with their current context that they cannot
imagine new paradigms and revolutionary ideas.We
are far from being disappointed with the evidently
short technology horizon of people. When we
consider these ideas from a business point of view,
we see that the ideas deemed Conventional represent
needs of a large group of potential customers that
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have not been met by the service providers. We see
potential breakthrough opportunities by new
offerings formed from thousands of raw ideas.
We were also expecting to see more ideas related
to new developments in the Internet such as social
networking and the creation of mobile user-
generated content. Another topic that we expected to
see more was commerce, payment and identification
of users using mobile technology. Both of these
developments are active in the Internet, but
participants of these events did not see the need for
carrying out these tasks with their mobile systems.
Many of these services, however, require that
new revenue-models should be defined, which
would enable the penetration of mobile services
based on the content and interest rather than merely
on data traffic costs.
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
The 40,000 ideas for new mobile services expressed
by the participants are far from well-defined
business concepts ripe for commercialization. The
ideas still require further development and
professional elaboration before they can be
introduced to the market as products or services.
In this study we presented the findings based on
a technical analysis of 4,000 ideas. The findings
were grouped into three principal practical
implications: 1) Consumers share their ideas freely,
2) vast majority of the ideas can be implemented by
means of existing technologies, and 3) consumers’
technology foresight appears to be restricted by their
experience with current technology and paradigms.
In order to advance this development we plan to
carry out a set of analyses for the idea database. One
particular topic that we are interested in is
comparing the differences in ideas of people of
different age. We want to explore this further in
future studies. We will continue to expand the Idea
Movement to other countries, cultures and
nationalities in the near future. The Idea
Movement’s (www.idealiike.fi) idea bank is now
open in Finnish for all commercial, research and
educational purposes. The ideas will be opened up in
English as well. This enables the development of
these ideas in global context.
We predict that the actual value of these ideas is
generated in the idea refinement phase where
hundreds of ideas are combined and enriched
through the conceptualization process. This is a task
reserved for companies and organizations with the
ability to efficiently commercialize the services. Idea
Movement, therefore, makes a link between the
intellectual capital of ordinary citizens and the
technology business know-how of companies which
results in a potential win-win situation.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We acknowledge Idea Movement Partners, Maaretta
Törrö and Anssi Öörni.
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