Introduction

Creative ideas, as a starting point of any innovation endeavor, play a crucial role for companies who seek competitive advantages in a turbulent marketplace (Cox & Blake, 1991). This is especially true for the companies operating in mobile service sectors and related business. In this article, mobile service is used as an umbrella term to refer to mobile apps, mobile software-as-a-service, hardware, and any combinations of them. Several changes occurred in the mobile service market since the Apple App Store, the Google Play store, and the Nokia Ovi store started opening in 2007 (Lane et al., 2010). These platforms have revolutionized the concept of the mobile phone, hosting the release of new content every day. Nowadays, the majority of mobile devices require services such as voice and data services, SMS (Short Message Service), video streaming, location-based services, and so forth. For the companies in this arena, one key question they need to constantly answer is, “Where are the ideas for the next leading mobile services coming from?”

Innovative ideas can come from both inside and outside a company. Companies that utilize external actors and sources in their idea generation processes tend to be more innovative (Laursen & Salter, 2006). Research into the relationship between customer and product innovation maintains that existing customers are often considered a valuable source of creativity and innovation (von Hippel, 1986). The “voice of customer” needs to be heard (Laursen & Salter, 2006). Listening to the voices of customers and observing their behaviors may provide valuable data on unsatisfied needs and point to creative solutions to existing problems. However, for high-technology industries such as mobile technology, it has been argued that ordinary customers are not a good source for new ideas because “real-world experience of ordinary users is often rendered obsolete by the time a product is developed or during the time of its projected commercial lifetime” (von Hippel, 1986, p. 796). The widely used term lead users—those users who face needs that will be general in a marketplace several months or years before ordinary users do—is coined in the same study. Von Hippel (1986) argued that lead users are in a better position to provide accurate data on future needs; however, they suffer the same constraints of ordinary customers posed by their real-world experience and available technology.

Children, however, are one group of people who suffer less from the above-mentioned constraints (Druin, 2002), and a never-ending source of imagination (Scaife & Rogers, 1998). They are less constrained by existing technology frame due to their little life experience. Still, they somehow remain as a neglected group by market and innovation research, perhaps due to the traditional views of the all-knowing adults and the all-learning children (Druin, 2002). Children are not considered a lead user group as defined by von Hippel (1986), and they cannot even be considered as a customer group due to their lack of purchasing power. However, the studies conducted before the Internet age hint that children, especially young children, are more creative than people from other age groups. Children have been proposed to be part of the processes to design new technologies, in the roles of informants, design partners, or even leaders (Druin, 2002, 2010; Read, 2015; Vint, 2005; Yip et al., 2013). The mobile phone industry might really benefit from this neglected source of creative ideas.

Research Question: Can young children be a valuable source of creative mobile service ideas?

This is the research question that our study sets out to answer. As far as the authors are aware of, there are no other studies along this line of inquiry. The purpose of this study is to have a better understanding of the voices of young children in terms of creative mobile service ideas. To this end, two sets of mobile service ideas randomly sampled from a larger survey conducted in 2006 were analyzed. One set contained 400 unique ideas expressed by a group of young children of 7 to 12 years old. The other set included 400 distinctive ideas from a group of adults aged from 17 to 50 years. These ideas were analyzed using a conceptual framework of creativity derived from the literature, in which creativity is conceptualized as a compound concept with two dimensions: novelty and quality. Both dimensions have two associated constructs: originality and paradigm relatedness for the novelty dimension, and relevance and workability for quality (Dean, Hender, Rodgers, & Santanen, 2006). We tested the difference between the two samples along the above-mentioned dimensions and constructs. The findings of our study empirically demonstrate that young children are actually a valuable source to derive novel ideas that are also of high quality. In contrast, the adults’ ideas are deemed to be less novel and of lower quality.

The remaining part of the article is organized as follows. This section continues with laying out the background and related work. The concept of creativity is investigated in the Conceptualization of Creative Ideas subsection. The research approach is described in the Materials and Method section. Then the Results section reports the obtained outcomes of the study, which are further discussed in the light of relevant studies in the Discussion section. The limitations of the study are reflected on in the same section. The last section concludes the article and outlines future work.