The Playful Ingenuity of Potential Users in Collaboration: Enriched Compensation and Improvisation

Identifying shifts in the needs and behavior of social systems and markets depicts promising new market opportunities for creative organizations. Potential users might be adept in reflecting those shifts and irregularities in collaboration due to their outsider perspective. This article is a systematic inquiry into the unique contribution of potential users and its embodiment in communication in co-creation activities. Following the principles of grounded theory, contributions and strategies of potential users are contrasted with those of current users within varying dyadic compositions. Tentative propositions about the merits and limitations of collaboration with potential users and about emergences in varying dyadic compositions are derived. The resulting core category ‘enriched compensation and improvisation’ shows that potential users’ contributions unintentionally pervade the collaboration with social, cultural and emotional values, which can be regarded as problem-finding as opposed to problem-solving creativity. There is also a process dimension immanent in the merit which facilitates the depth of ideas and how much of it can be made explicit to be understood. Their willingness to improvise leads to a series of ad-hoc changes of initial ideas which foster transformation when combined. Organizational guidelines are derived that endorse the use of critique and the emphasis on depth of ideas as opposed to collaborative consent and quantity of ideas in exploration with potential users.