In Need of Creative Mobile Service Ideas? Forget Adults and Ask Young Children
Ilona Kuzmickaja, Xiaofeng Wang, Daniel Graziotin, Gabriella Dodero,, Pekka Abrahamsson

TL;DR
This study demonstrates that young children aged 7-12 generate more original, transformational, and relevant mobile service ideas than adults, highlighting children as valuable sources for innovative ideas in mobile services.
Contribution
The paper provides empirical evidence that young children are a superior source of creative mobile service ideas compared to adults, challenging traditional reliance on adult input.
Findings
Children's ideas are significantly more original.
Children's ideas are more transformational and relevant.
Children's ideas are more implementable.
Abstract
It is well acknowledged that innovation is a key success factor in mobile service domain. Having creative ideas is the first critical step in the innovation process. Many studies suggest that customers are a valuable source of creative ideas. However, the literature also shows that adults may be constrained by existing technology frames, which are known to hinder creativity. Instead young children (aged 7-12) are considered digital natives yet are free from existing technology frames. This led us to study them as a potential source for creative mobile service ideas. A set of 41,000 mobile ideas obtained from a research project in 2006 granted us a unique opportunity to study the mobile service ideas from young children. We randomly selected two samples of ideas (N=400 each), one contained the ideas from young children, the other from adults (aged 17-50). These ideas were evaluated by…
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