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On Exploring Consumers' Technology Foresight Capabilities - An Analysis of 4000 Mobile Service Ideas

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 40000 ideas from 2150 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 4000 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.