In the world of mobile services and devices, a highly competitive sector, to survive and succeed it is necessary to present products with high innovative content.

But who are the best innovators in the sector?

The answer might seem absurd, but it is actually them: children!

To create something unique and new, companies study the needs and requirements of their customers through workshops and focus groups, gathering information and ideas that will be the basis for innovation.

The secret, in fact, to satisfy a need, is to create one, discovering a necessity that the public does not yet know they want to see fulfilled, and to achieve this, the key factor is creativity.

According to a recent study by a group of computer scientists from the Free University of Bolzano, the best ideas and insights come from the segment that companies ignore: children aged 7 to 12, who with their imagination, are the epitome of creativity.

Among other things, one of the reasons why children provide much more original and innovative ideas compared to adults, according to these scholars, is the absence of a long technological history that could risk conditioning them. Digital native children know almost none of the objects that were used in the past, using the latest technologies from an early age, they do not risk comparing them with something that already exists, letting themselves be inspired only by their imagination.

The study conducted by the researchers was based on a sample of 41,000 ideas for the mobile sector collected in 31 workshops in 2006, from which a random sample of 400 belonging to children aged 7 to 12 and 400 provided by people over 17 years old were selected. These ideas were then submitted to a jury of experts and professionals in the sector, who evaluated them without knowing the originator.

81% of the ideas proposed by children aged 7 to 12 in 2006 are now a reality!

The results of this study have shown that, on average, children’s ideas are qualitatively better and also more original, and, since they were proposed in 2006, it has been found that 81% of those of children, compared to 69% of adults’ ideas, have been realized in the following years.

Successful companies have actually discovered the inexhaustible source of originality and creativity of children for some time; the famous slogan “What would the world be without Nutella?“, adopted by Ferrero for years, was precisely the result of a child’s expression.