Practitioners or Academics: Which Are We?
The Computer Society has a long tradition of serving the academic side of our membership, but many of the recent efforts have targeted the "practitioner" side. Of course, in reality, there's no hard division between the two, and IT Pro and the CS seek to serve those at all points along the continuum.
This article discusses different ways in which users may be involved in the ideation phase of service innovation and the results and limitations of such involvement. The study compares the use of a blog and two differently setup future workshops one with users only and the other with a mix of users and employees in a library. The authors' study shows that the blog is efficient in giving the users voice whereas the mixed workshop method involving users and employees is particularly efficient at qualifying and further developing ideas. The findings suggest that methods for involving users in ideation should be carefully selected and combined to achieve optimum benefits and avoid potential disadvantages.