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)...

It is known that end users of products and services sometimes innovate, and that innovations developed by users sometimes become the basis for important new-commercial products and services. It has also been argued and to some extent shown that such innovations will be found concentrated in a...

In this paper, we report findings from a first nationally-representative survey of household sector innovation in China, and offer two major new findings to that literature stream. First, we find that 23.2 million Chinese citizens are household innovators when we include householders who develop...

The impact of user innovation on social welfare isanalyzed by comparing user innovators to manufacturer innovators in terms oftheir innovation incentives and knowledge.Following a review of theliterature on product development by users, it is argued that the introductionof user innovation in a...

Presents a series of studies showing that the sources of innovation vary greatly; possible sources include innovation users, suppliers of innovation-related components, and product manufacturers. These types of roles are known as functional areas. Specific areas of innovation are marked by...

Individual citizens have been found to be a major source of new product and service innovations of value both to themselves and to the economy at large. These citizen innovators operate in a little understood legal environment that we call the innovation wetlands. We show via a review of...

When economists and innovation practitioners think about whether developing an innovation will be worthwhile, they tend to think exclusively about the economic value of the outcome of the innovation process. In this article, we develop and explore the idea that innovators can also gain...