Empirical studies of innovation have found that end users frequently develop important product and process innovations. Defying conventional wisdom on the negative effects of uncompensated spillovers, innovative users also often openly reveal their innovations to competing users and to...

In this paper we propose that norms-based intellectual property (IP) systems exist today and are an important complement to or substitute for law-based IP systems. Norms-based IP systems, as we define them, operate entirely on the basis of implicit social norms that are held in common by members...

Objective. To determine the role of clinicians in the discovery of off-label use of prescription drugs approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).Data Sources. Micromedex Healthcare Series was used to identify new uses of new molecular entities approved by the FDA in 1998,...

The literature on new goods and social welfare generally assumes that innovations are developed by manufacturers. But innovation by users has been found to also be an important part of innovative activity in the economy. In this paper we explore the impact of users as a source of innovation on...

This paper explores the nature of adaptive learning around new technology in organizations. To understand this issue, we examine the process of problem solving involving new production equipment during early factory use. We find that adaptation is a situated process, in that different...

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...

Research into free and open source software development projects has so far largely focused on how the major tasks of software development are organized and motivated. But a complete project requires the execution of “mundane but necessary” tasks as well. In this paper, we explore how the...

Empirical studies have shown that millions of individual users develop new products and services to serve their own needs. The economic impact of this phenomenon increases if and as adopters in addition to the initial innovators also gain benefits from those user-developed innovations. It has...

In a study of innovations developed by mountain bikers, we find that user-innovators almost always utilize “local” information– information already in their possession or generated by themselves – both to determine the need for and to develop the solutions for their innovations. We argue...

In the traditional new product development process, manufacturers first explore user needs and then develop responsive products. Developing an accurate understanding of a user need is not simple or fast or cheap, however. As a result, the traditional approach is coming under increasing strain as...