We offer a critical reflection on one of the key reasons for the startlingly low success rate of innovation initiatives worldwide – the fact that the interactive environment surrounding the customer is a critical part of the adoption process; it can and should be designed in a way that enables customer creativity, and thus adoption. In this article, we embrace a definition of innovation as “the adoption of a new practice by a community” where the innovator is the one who does not only sense and move into new opportunities but also mobilizes all the necessary resources needed by customers to adopt a new practice. The emphasis on adoption merges together innovation and entrepreneurship by shifting the focus from the inventor and the designer, through the entrepreneur, to the ultimate recipient of the innovative outcomes. Looking at customers as co-creators is critically important for technological product adoption; missing the chance to enable their creativity is equivalent to missing the opportunity of seeing them for who they really are. The result is a distorted vision that is ultimately rooted in the misconception of the dynamics of customer value. We particularly emphasize two points: i) the increasing degree of complexity of everyday technological products requires a higher degree of creativity by customers to adopt; and ii) customer creativity is not only a function of user-technology interaction, it is a function of the various actors in the interactive environment surrounding the customer such as other customers, other technologies, local distributors, customer/technical support providers, and competitors.
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