Many services can be self-provided. An individual user or a user firm can, for example, choose to do its own accounting – choose to self-provide that service - instead of hiring an accounting firm to provide it. Since users can ‘serve themselves’ in many cases, it is also possible for...

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...

This research note reports upon the first survey of household sector innovation in China. Compared to previous survey studies we add two first-of-kind variables and related findings.First, we include data on individual income, a resource-related antecedent of household sector innovation. We find...

In this paper we model the pathways commonly traversed as user innovations are transformed into commercial products. First, one or more users recognize a new set of design possibilities and begin to innovate. They then join into communities, motivated by the increased efficiency of collective...

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...