  It is well acknowledged that innovation is a key success factor in mobile
service domain. Having creative ideas is the first critical step in the
innovation process. Many studies suggest that customers are a valuable source
of creative ideas. However, the literature also shows that adults may be
constrained by existing technology frames, which are known to hinder
creativity. Instead young children (aged 7-12) are considered digital natives
yet are free from existing technology frames. This led us to study them as a
potential source for creative mobile service ideas. A set of 41,000 mobile
ideas obtained from a research project in 2006 granted us a unique opportunity
to study the mobile service ideas from young children. We randomly selected two
samples of ideas (N=400 each), one contained the ideas from young children, the
other from adults (aged 17-50). These ideas were evaluated by several
evaluators using an existing creativity framework. The results show that the
mobile service ideas from the young children are significantly more original,
transformational, implementable, and relevant than those from the adults.
Therefore, this study shows that young children are better sources of novel and
quality ideas than adults in the mobile services domain. This study bears
significant contributions to the creativity and innovation research. It also
indicates a new and valuable source for the companies that seek for creative
ideas for innovative products and services.
