Sample for

Dataset for the study "In need of Creative Mobile Service Ideas? Forget the adults and talk to the children!" 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 little kids (aged 7-12), neglected in the design of new technologies, are free from existing technology frames. This led us to study little kids as a potential source for creative mobile service ideas. A set of 31,370 mobile ideas obtained from a research project in 2006 granted us a unique opportunity to study the mobile service ideas from kids. We selected two random samples of ideas (N=400 each), one contained ideas from little kids, the other from adults (aged 17-50). We evaluated them using an existing creativity framework. The results show that kids’ mobile service ideas are more novel and of higher quality compared to those from adults. 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.