Consumer flash fiction: a methodology to support the early sensing of far-future innovation opportunities

Consumer-centered innovation with a far-future time frame is challenging because of the ineffectiveness of traditional market research tools in that context. Drawing on scholarly research that has identified creative action as a means of capturing the visionary knowledge of non-experts in scenario development, we propose consumer flash fiction as a methodology that allows firms to access consumer visions about the far future. Flash fiction stories are very short science fiction stories of 150-300 words and flow-written by non-experts in workshops designed specifically for that purpose. However, we find that the involvement of non-experts such as consumers in scenario development is rare. This limits our understanding about the type(s) of insights that far-future flash fiction-based consumer scenarios can provide to strategists during the early opportunity sensing phase of innovation. To address this gap, we present and analyze the outcomes of three studies that collected about 859 consumer flash fiction stories on different far-future topics. In addition, we contribute to the conceptualization of the so-far lacking understanding of the complementarity between the traditional expert opinion-based science fiction scenario development approaches and consumer flash fiction.