This paper characterizes and explores a corporate strategy in which downstream firms collaborate to develop open substitute designs for proprietary hardware they would otherwise purchase from upstream suppliers. This strategy centrally involves customers themselves distributing design costs over...

User needs for a given product type can be quite heterogeneous. Segmenting the market and providing solutions for average user needs in each segment is a partial answer that will typically leave many dissatisfied - some seriously so....

Currently, two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The “private investment” model assumesreturns to the innovator result from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection. The “collective action” model assumes that under conditions of...

A detailed survey of 498 high technology small and medium-sized enterprises in the Netherlands shows process innovation by user firms to be common practice. Fifty-four percent of these firms reported developing entirely novel process equipment or software for their own use and/or modifying...