Innovating as an interaction of practices: the case of customers’ use of a new website

While innovation is the final outcome of a company-based process, ‘innovating’ is innovation in action, that is, it takes place within the normal consumer practices surrounding a new product or service. By engaging with a new product, consumers shape innovation. Thus, consumers provide the final, essential stage in a company’s innovation. This chapter will focus on the actual use of new web-services by customers. Through a mixed method approach based on observation and introspection, we analysed the practices of Internet users that unfold when facing a website that is new to them, and addressed the question of which practices customers adopt in order to allow an innovation to enter their daily practices. We argue that the use of a new service is an interaction between the consumer practices required by the design of the new service (such as pressing buttons, following a detailed sequence of options, etc.) and the regular daily practices of the customers (such as opening a link, putting keywords in a search engine, etc.). The success of this interaction determines the success of the innovation, while its failure requires an adjustment to the innovation design.