Fostering Ideation Among Patients: Exaptation of Web-based Ideation Platforms as Health 2.0 Tools for Virtual Patient Communities

It has been a long tradition that patients interact via discussion forums in virtual patient communities (VPCs) to share experiences and information. Nowadays, patients are beginning to develop ideas for innovative products and services within these communication forums. However, ideation in communication forums leads to poorly conceived and not well elaborated ideas, since these forums are primarily designed to support communication behaviors of many-to-many and not to support mass ideation interactions. Against this backdrop, the aim of this research is to enrich VPCs with a Web-based Ideation Platform (WBIP). We show that ideation outcome improves by means of a WBIP in VPCs due to the WBIP's inherent semantic representation of ideation processes. This paper describes the theory-ingrained design as well as the piloting and evaluation of this IT artifact, namely the WBIP. The findings of this action design research show that idea quality rises significantly with the help of a WBIP.