User Involvement in Service Innovation Processes

This article presents the results of a study investigating user involvement in the idea generation phase of service innovation, and discusses advantages and limitations of such involvement. Specifically, the study compares the use of social media such as blogs and future workshops to generate idea for service innovations in the context of a research library. Our study shows that the blog is good in opening up for user contributions, while the future workshop involving users and employees is particularly good at qualifying and further developing ideas. The findings suggest therefore that methods for user involvement should be carefully selected and combined to achieve optimum benefits and avoid potential disadvantages.