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...

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...

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...

The impact of user innovation on social welfare isanalyzed by comparing user innovators to manufacturer innovators in terms oftheir innovation incentives and knowledge.Following a review of theliterature on product development by users, it is argued that the introductionof user innovation in a...

Via a study of innovating German consumers, we explore links between the “Big Five” personality traits and successful accomplishment of three basic innovation process stages by consumer-innovators: (1) generating an idea for a new product or product improvement, (2) developing a prototype...

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 literature on new goods and social welfare generally assumes that innovations are developed by manufacturers. But innovation by users has been found to also be an important part of innovative activity in the economy. In this paper we explore the impact of users as a source of innovation on...

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...