How to improve originality of new service concepts? Using analogical thinking to assist in ordinary user's idea generation

• Main Authors: Wenkai Wang, 王玟凱
• Other Authors: Yen-liang Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/31033048128101110688

博士 === 國立中央大學 === 資訊管理學系 === 101 === Along the rapid development of new technologies, technology-based services have become essentials in human life. Because customers are the major objects which service providers are eager to satisfy, customers’ inputs are then regarded crucial for developing new technology-based services. However, due to the lack of competence and proper tools, customers are hardly to transform their ideas into an interpretive form of new service ideas even though they possess rich first-hand experiences in usage. Therefore, the author reviewed the literatures of new service idea generation and creative thinking techniques, and proposed analogical thinking as a beneficial creativity technique to facilitate the transformation from use experiences into valid ideas of new services. Meanwhile, applying certain managing tactics in the process of idea generation may further improve the effectiveness of analogical thinking. In order to examine the above argument, the author selected mobile application services as the research context and recruited undergraduate students to join in a 2x2 (analogical distance and source requirement) experiment. The experiment result shows that (1) analogical distance is contributive to the production of more far analogies and the variety of analogy, (2) applying source requirement leads to higher variety of analogy. However, the expected interaction effect between analogical distance and source requirement on variety of analogy is not supported. Finally, variety of analogy and the proportion of far analogies are both significant predictors to the improvement of idea originality. At the end, the author provided discussion, theoretical contribution, and expected managerial implication.