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Design thinking is a powerful method for understanding customer needs and developing new solutions to meet them. It has been used by innovators to invent consumer products like electric toothbrushes and to develop business-to-business services such as customer relationship management software. A key advantage of the design-thinking process over other innovation methods is its emphasis on the user experience. Whether a team is imagining a car dashboard, a tax declaration app, or an electric lawnmower, each step relies on repeated, personal interactions among team members, end users, and other stakeholders. To facilitate such interactions, observational workshops are typically conducted onsite in end users' familiar environments or in carefully arranged design studios. In recent years, however, with the rise in hybrid work, we have seen some innovation processes shift to the digital realm. Design-thinking practitioners now frequently watch consumers use products through videoconferencing and discuss their observations on digital conference boards and in group chats. Using these kinds of digital tools is certainly more convenient than getting people into the same room.

PurposeMisinformation is notoriously difficult to combat. Although social media firms have focused on combating the publication of misinformation, misinformation accusations, an important by-product of the spread of misinformation, have been neglected. The authors offer insights into factors contributing to the spread of misinformation accusations on social media platforms.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use a corpus of 234,556 tweets about the 2020 US presidential election (Study 1) and 99,032 tweets about the 2022 US midterm elections (Study 2) to show how the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by locomotion orientation.FindingsThe study findings indicate that the sharing of misinformation accusations is explained by writers' lower locomotion orientation, which is amplified among liberal tweet writers.Research limitations/implicationsPractitioners and policymakers can use the study findings to track and reduce the spread of misinformation accusations by developing algorithms to analyze the language of posts. A limitation of this research is that it focuses on political misinformation accusations. Future research in different contexts, such as vaccines, would be pertinent.Practical implicationsThe authors show how social media firms can identify messages containing misinformation accusations with the potential to become viral by considering the tweet writer's locomotion language and geographical data.Social implicationsEarly identification of messages containing misinformation accusations can help to improve the quality of the political conversation and electoral decision-making.Originality/valueStrategies used by social media platforms to identify misinformation lack scale and perform poorly, making it important for social media platforms to manage misinformation accusations in an effort to retain trust. The authors identify linguistic and geographical factors that drive misinformation accusation retweets.

Physical products (e.g., cars, smartphones) increasingly evolve into dynamic service platforms that allow for customization through fee-based activation of restricted add-on features throughout their lifecycle. The authors refer to this emerging phenomenon as “internal product upgrades”. Drawing on normative expectations literature, this research examines pitfalls of internal product upgrades that marketers need to understand. Six experimental studies in two different contexts (consumer-electronics, automotive) reveal that consumers respond less favorably to internal (vs. external) product upgrades. The analyses show that customer-perceived betrayal, which results from increased feature ownership perceptions, drives the effects. Moreover, this research identifies three boundary conditions: it shows that the negative effects are attenuated when (1) the company (vs. consumer) executes the upgrading, and (2) consumers upgrade an intangible (vs. tangible) feature. Finally, consumers react less negatively when (3) the base product is less relevant to their self-identity.