Effects of stimulating communication on customers' idea generation processes

Sustainable open innovation often has idea generation as a key step. When faced with challenge of stimulating ideation, organizations have few things they are sure about. An experiment was conducted to identify what type of stimulating written communication yields the biggest number of submitted ideas from students as users of educational services from their university. Results show that users generate more ideas when they are presented with specific problems that need solution than when they are generally asked to give any ideas for improvement they have. These results are discussed in the context of stimulating ideation through open innovation software platforms. This research tried to examine possible communication stimuli that may lead to bigger number of submitted ideas by users. In conclusion, the results of this research are applied to the field of open innovation software.