Taken from The Proceedings of The XX ISPIM Conference 2009 Vienna, Austria - 21-24 June 2009 ISBN 978-952-214-767-7.

Understanding Innovation Community Users

Author(s)

Anna Ståhlbröst, Birgitta Bergvall-Kåreborn, Marita Holst

Abstract

Today, we are facing new and challenging situations with the growing financial crisis and the difficult times for companies with a decreasing number of customers and declining revenues. It is therefore important for companies to challenge their way of thinking and developing innovations. An up-coming approach to innovation is to open up the innovation process and to include users in this process. Due to immaturity of this approach, there is little knowledge on how these communities should be designed and used to really support companies’ innovation processes. In this paper, we illustrate how and why users engage in innovation communities, as well as the nature of these users. We do this with the objective to render results that can guide companies on how to utilize their on-line user communities in order to accelerate user’s participation in open innovation processes.

Keywords

Open Innovation; User Involvement; Innovation Communities; Living Lab; Participation