In this paper the authors explore the incentives that usersmight have to freely reveal their proprietary innovations. They develop agame-theoretic model to explore the effect of these incentives on users´ decisions to reveal or hide their proprietary information.

To solve a problem, needed information and problem-solving capabilities must be brought together... [Eric von Hippel]<p>

"Informal" know-how trading is the extensive exchange of proprietaryknow-how by informal networks of process engineers in rival (and non-rival)firms ...

When products, processes and services are introduced for the first time totheir intended use environments, things often go wrong: Software is found to haveunanticipated "bugs"; process machines that worked very well in the developmentlaboratory promptly fail when first installed in a factory,...

Innovation projects are "partitioned" into smaller tasks. Precisely where the boundaries between such tasks are placed can affect project outcome and the efficiency of task performance due to associated changes in the problem-solvinginterdependence among tasks....