Desumers as Ideators in New Product Development

Studies confirm that, successful products must be based on understanding users through direct communication with users during product development process. Users may have less to offer during product development, due to limited abilities to describe what they expect from the product. There are different ways to involve users, depending on which users and at which phase of the development process. Approaches and characteristics of users are still an issue of debate. Hippel’s work concerning lead users plays an important role in this area since then, there was a growth in user terminology, such as prosumers, and core users. this paper explores what I term the " DESUMERS “. The term is a portmanteau of the words (Designer and consumer) to describe users that would participate in creating innovative ideas or what is known as Ideators within the product development process based on the Design By Approach (M. A. Kauliu.1998). Many companies call for innovative ideas, as in Ikea case. These companies aim to detect innovative ideas that could increase its position in the market. Such calls can last for long times and a substantial number of ideators would respond, this naturally would lead to enormous numbers of ideas that consume lots of effort and time, and because it’s an open call creative and uncreative ideas would appear. This paper suggests involving Desumers as Ideators in the ideation phase, of design process based on certain characteristics they own. The novelty of this approach would enrich the sub takes gained for the designer while help Desumers get benefits (financially and socially).



Research problem: The “Design by” approach used among designers should gain better outcomes in a shorter time and less effort, this may not be achieved unless the targeted users have certain creative characters, this would be achieved by building standards in the form of characters of those creative users coined, Desumers. The research seeks achieving this through answering the following questions:

- Who are the suggested users coined” Desumers”?

- What are the characteristics of Desumers’?

- Could Desumers help designers gain better ideation when involved?



Research aim: Introducing Desumers who can participate successfully in design process based on Design by Users’ Approach &defining their characteristics, as a new term that refers to users with higher level of creativity than lead users.



Key words: Co Design, Lead users, Prosumers, NPD (New Product Development), latent needs, Ideators