Service Creation by Users:

Abstract

Crowdsourcing refers to gathering of ideas from users and utilization of these ideas for product development. This approach has garnered significant attention, but despite its advantages, many companies that utilize crowdsourcing face difficulties in gathering user ideas. Even if ideas are obtained from users, many companies fail to utilize them effectively or are unable to continue to do so. Mineo, a low-cost smartphone company, provides a good example of overcoming these difficulties. The company has been able to collect about 9,100 ideas from users and has implemented roughly 1,100 of these ideas. In this paper, we first introduce the “Idea Farm,” which serves as a centralized platform for collection of ideas from users on the Mineo community site “mineo-ou”. Next, we show that new services have been created and existing services improved based on user ideas. Finally, we discuss three outstanding aspects of the approach taken by Mineo in collecting numerous user ideas and evolving these ideas into attractive services: 1) securing the quantity of ideas, 2) improving the quality of ideas, and 3) consideration of all ideas by executives and facilitation of the realization of user ideas.

Keywords

• co-creation
• user innovation
• open innovation
• new product development
• community site