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...

The rise of free goods and the digital revolution have generated new interest in household activities and how they should be measured. Earlier research considered other household activities, including household production and human capital accumulation. Yet, one important household activity,...

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...

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...

Firms and governments are increasingly interested in learning to exploit the value of lead user innovations for commercial advantage. Improvements to lead user theory are needed to inform and guide these efforts. In this paper we empirically test and confirm the basic tenants of lead user...

I define a ‘system of use’ as a collection of components that interact during use to accomplish a system-level goal. For example, all the products and behaviors that a tennis player combines and applies when playing tennis – tennis racket, tennis shoes, tennis game strategy, serving...

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...

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...

Those who solve more of a given type of problem tend to get better at it — which suggests that problems of any given type should be brought to specialists for a solution. However, in this paper we argue that agency-related costs and information transfer costs (‘‘sticky'' local information)...