Benefits and costs of radical open innovations

This research consists of four independent articles in addition this synthesis. The research question is: What are the benefits and costs associated with the infusion of customer participation in radical innovations on the firm-level? According to the results, users do and co-create successful radical innovations - even if literature claims otherwise. The results support the crucial role of customers in companies’ innovation process. The radical innovations were most commonly claimed to come from outsiders. Frequently a radical innovation comes through people trying to solve a problem that’s relevant to them. Two benefits associated with the infusion of customer participation in the B2B radical innovation process are: using crowd for microtasking, and using a community for co-creation, the so-called white labelling. Co-creation with customers in open innovation can lead to a great success when creating a ‘trust network, but the biggest challenge is the resistance to change involving big and radical systems. The best methods for innovation research are diaries and workshops, but surveys are not good since the survey seemed to work in the past tense (‘Did you enjoy the graphics of the game?’), but in the innovation process future tense answers are wanted (‘What kind of game would you like to play?’). In this research it was found that lead users are a willing, untapped, and limitless resource of innovation for the development process in industries where users feel passionately about the service, and they are needed in fields lacking employees.