In this paper we report upon a first empirical exploration of the relative efficiency of innovation development by product users vs. product producers. In a study of over 50 years of product innovation in the whitewater kayaking field, we find users in aggregate were approximately 3X more...

Manufacturers usually benefit by dividing their innovation processes into distinct phases in order to ensure that the development activities are performed efficiently in an appropriate sequence. Users usually do not apply such structured processes. They follow a more intuition-driven approach....