Employees as User Innovators: An Empirical Investigation of an Idea Management System

Abstract

While the user-innovation literature has considered firms as potential user-innovators, little is known about the individual contributions by employees of producer-firms, who innovate to address their own specific needs within their firm, and which we refer to as employee-users. We investigate the innovation proposals made by employee-user to an idea management system and theorize that their proposals are more likely to challenge existing processes and structures when compared with other employee proposals. We contend that employee-user proposals are more likely than other proposals to be turned into the firm’s broader practice, regardless of their level of development. Furthermore, we find that the origin of the proposals is a better predictor of the likelihood of adoption than their level of development. We also find that employee-users contribute beyond continuous process improvement initiatives with proposals for new products and services. We discuss the implications for theory and practice and suggest ways for companies to increase the success rate of the ideas submitted by the broad base of employees to idea management systems and to bring more radical ideas to these systems. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to bridge the idea management and user innovation literatures and to directly examine broader contribution of employees as potential user-innovators, introducing the term employee-user innovations to emphasize conceptual difference from other types of user-innovators.

Keywords: idea management systems, employee involvement, employee-user innovation, innovation management

JEL Classification: O31, O32