Modding – the modification of existing products by consumers – is increasingly exploited by manufacturers to enhance product development and sales. In the computer games industry modding has evolved into a development model in which users act as unpaid “complementors” to manufacturers’...

The arguably dominant contemporary approach to the analysis of sustained competitive advantage is the resource-based view. Taking Barney (1991) and Peteraf (1993) as representative summary statements of the view, we argue that much resource-based research rests on partial, implicit and...

Studies of the sources of innovations have recognized that many innovations are developed by users. However, the fact that firms employ communities of users to strengthen their innovation process has not yet received much attention. In firm-established user communities users freely reveal...

The knowledge-based approach and organizational economics are usually seen as offering opposing approaches to the explanation of organizational phenomena. Relying on a taxonomic framework from the philosophy of science, we argue that many differences between these approaches are more apparent...

This study describes a process in which a firm relies on an external consumer community for innovation. While it has been recognized that users may sometimes innovate, little is known about what commercial firms can do to motivate and capture such innovations and their related benefits. We...

We address the issue of promoting synergies in divisionalized, diversified firms from the perspectives of the resource-based view and recent work on corporate headquarters, thus connecting the analysis of sustained competitive advantage with organizational issues. We begin by clarifying the...

Leading firms have begun to offer “user toolkits for innovation”. User toolkits are seen as a means to eliminate (costly) iterations of need-related-information between users and producers in the product development process because toolkits allow users to perform need-related aspects of...