Employees as User Innovators: An Empirical Investigation of an Idea Management System
Leid Zejnilović, Pedro Oliveira, Francisco M. Veloso · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2012
We analyze ideas submitted by the firm’s employees to an idea management system (IMS) of a large international ICT firm, and find that 6% of 759 analyzed ideas are records of user innovations by employees, which we refer to as employee-users. While it is intuitive to have employees modifying internal processes because of their use experience, we also find cases where employee-users innovate creating new products and services or significantly change the way firm delivers their existing service. We find ideas in the IMS that represent user innovation more likely to be successful than the other ideas in the IMS, and the result held with two different measures of the success. We find the odds of success are increased by a factor of 86.9 for the ideas that describe employee-user innovations, and increased for a factor of 1.24 for every additional year of the employees’ tenure, holding other variables constant. We discuss the implications of our findings on corporate idea and innovation management