The usefulness of knowledge from library staff, faculty and students for developing service innovations in academic libraries

Academic libraries involve library users and external organizations in developing innovations, yet there is limited evidence on the usefulness of knowledge obtained from different users and via different participation methods. Drawing on open innovation and innovation ecosystem perspectives, this paper analyses how consultation, co-creation, and collaboration with external partners contribute to the usefulness of knowledge for innovation. The study uses survey data from 290 academic libraries in 31 European countries to examine the usefulness of knowledge from library staff, faculty/researchers, and students for identifying innovation challenges and developing solutions. The results show that co-creation has a stronger positive association with knowledge usefulness than consultation. Library staff are the most useful source of knowledge across both challenges and solutions. Faculty/researchers are almost twice as likely as students to participate in co-creation and are perceived to provide more useful knowledge than students. The analyses identify complementary and substitution effects between knowledge sources. Collaboration with external partners complements knowledge from library users and library staff, while substitution effects show that co-creation with one user group can reduce the perceived usefulness of knowledge from another group. Different actors contribute different types of knowledge, requiring academic libraries to strategically combine participation mechanisms and knowledge sources.