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...

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...