Manufacturers usually benefit by dividing their innovation processes into distinct phases in order to ensure that the development activities are performed efficiently in an appropriate sequence. Users usually do not apply such structured processes. They follow a more intuition-driven approach....

Innovation has traditionally been seen as the province of producers. However, theoretical and empirical research now shows that individual users – consumers – are also a major and increasingly important source of new product and service designs. In this paper, we build a microeconomic model...

In this book I integrate new theory and new research findings into the framework of a “free innovation paradigm.” Free innovation involves innovations developed and given away by consumers as a “free good,” with resulting improvements in social welfare. I explain that free innovation is...

The "lead user construct" was developed to preferentially identify commercially attractive innovation-related information developed by users of products and services. In this research, we use data drawn from users of Apache, an open source software project, to assess the association between each...

In a first survey of its type, we measure development and modification of consumer products by product users in a representative sample of 1,173 UK consumers aged 18 and over. We estimate this previously unmeasured type of innovation to be quite large: 6.1% of UK consumers – nearly 2.9 million...