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...

This research note reports upon the first survey of household sector innovation in China. Compared to previous survey studies we add two first-of-kind variables and related findings.First, we include data on individual income, a resource-related antecedent of household sector innovation. We find...

Household R&D (or household innovation) is an important source of innovation that has to date been largely overlooked in research related to national accounts. Indeed, it is not currently counted as investment in the literatures on household production and human capital. This paper develops time...

Innovation development, production, distribution and consumption networks can be built up horizontally with actors consisting only of innovation users (more precisely, user/self-manufacturers ). Some open source software projects are examples of such networks, and examples can be found in the...

Innovation commons – which we define as repositories of freely-accessible, “open source” innovation-related information and data - are a very significant resource for innovating and innovation-adopting firms and individuals: Availability of free data and information reduces the...

When individual consumers develop products for their own use, they in part expect to be rewarded by the use value of what they are creating (utilitarian user motives), and in part expect to be rewarded intrinsically by such things as the fun and learning experience derived from creating it...

It is known that end users of products and services sometimes innovate, and that innovations developed by users sometimes become the basis for important new-commercial products and services. It has also been argued and to some extent shown that such innovations will be found concentrated in a...

In this paper, we report findings from a first nationally-representative survey of household sector innovation in China, and offer two major new findings to that literature stream. First, we find that 23.2 million Chinese citizens are household innovators when we include householders who develop...

Presents a series of studies showing that the sources of innovation vary greatly; possible sources include innovation users, suppliers of innovation-related components, and product manufacturers. These types of roles are known as functional areas. Specific areas of innovation are marked by...