Customer Oriented Ideation and its Impact on Customer Adoption of New Solutions

Customer adoption of new solutions is critical for the development of the modern business environment, and both academics and practitioners have been investigating this notion to uncover the customer adoption patterns to progress business and withstand competition. Despite the variety of marketing research techniques and practices commonly used to obtain customer data it has been said that the customers that “talk the talk” do not always “walk the walk” of innovation adoption. The challenge remains unchanged: making innovation accessible and easy to adopt in consumers’ everyday lives.

This thesis is looking into the processes of creating new solutions to identify the key drivers within the ideation processes that facilitate adoption. The research inquiry is supported by the tendencies in the industry, where, despite the increasing number of new technologies and approaches aimed to develop better products, the success-to-failure ratios remain quite low. The aim of the study is to design an integrative theoretical framework, explaining the drivers of ideation, the impact of customer orientation within ideation, and the influence it has on innovation adoption.

The author used integrated methodology, combining the best practices of the deductive approach, commonly applied in conceptual works, and qualitative research methodology, where further insights were uncovered via interviews and a focus group. In this research project, the integrated methodology has been applied to combine the strengths of each of the research techniques and uncover insights into the complex notions and relationships under investigation.

The findings include the introduction of COI and the three-dimensional model, facilitating the solutions development practice, aiming to help achieve a more sustainable growth within the service industries. The author has introduced a novel notion of Customer Oriented Ideation (COI) that focuses on the use of customer insights within the solutions development process and its impact on the market success. The author has also developed a questionnaire for further quantitative investigation of the framework, and further refined it via a pilot study.