Shifting Innovation to Users via Toolkits

By Eric von Hippel, R. Katz. Management Sciences, 2002

1,311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 user needs change more rapidly, and as firms increasingly seek to serve "markets of one."Toolkits for user innovation is an emerging alternative approach in which manufacturers actuallyabandon the attempt to understand user needs in detail in favor of transferringneed-related aspects of product and service development to users. Experience in fields where the toolkit approach has been pioneered show custom products being developed much more quickly and at a lower cost. In this paper we explore toolkits for user innovation and explain why and how they work.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Management of Technology and Innovation, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/60ee1c5842afe50eef2135b7c7b9b78840146367

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In Computer Science Applications

In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Marketing

Citations in the corpus

Editorial Opening up the innovation process: towards an agenda (2006, background): “The degree of user integration has, however, increased from specification delivery to virtual users that develop products they desire by themselves (Dahan and Hauser, 2002; von Hippel and Katz, 2002; Gassmann et al., 2006).”
Do different types of innovation rely on specific kinds of knowledge interactions (2008, methodology): “…active role and participation of customers in the innovation process through the application of toolkits for user innovation and design (Von Hippel and Katz, 2002; Franke and Schreier, 2002) or through a virtual integration of customers into the company’s innovation process (Füller and…”
Why Customers Value Mass-customized Products: The Importance of Process Effort and Enjoyment (2010, background): “These toolkits allow trial-and-error experimentation and deliver immediate (simulated) feedback on the potential outcome of design ideas (von Hippel, 2001; von Hippel and Katz, 2002).”
Why Do Users Contribute to Firm-Hosted User Communities? The Case of Computer-Controlled Music Instruments (2006, background): “…to their products may offer an “open system,” as in the case of Sun Microsystems (see Garud and Kumaraswamy 1993); and free innovation equipment, such as toolkits for user innovation, that open up a solution space to users (von Hippel 2001, Thomke and von Hippel 2002, von Hippel and Katz 2002).”
Community based innovation: How to integrate members of virtual communities into new product development (2006, background): “In literature, a number of tools to interact virtually with consumers can be found [17, 68, 70], but it lacks a systematic approach shedding light on how to identify qualified consumers on the Internet, how to motivate them and how to interact with them, so that they share their knowledge with produ”
The Principles of Distributed Innovation (2007, background): “Task granularity and diversity in distributed innovation systems are further enhanced by the information processing nature of most tasks and widespread availability of low cost tools that support innovation.(16) OSS communities emerged as an ideal type of distributed innovation system because the fu”
Toolkits for Idea Competitions: A Novel Method to Integrate Users in New Product Development (2006, methodology): “Toolkits shift development and design tasks from the locus of the manufacturer to the user (Thomke and von Hippel, 2002; Franke and Piller, 2003, 2004; von Hippel and Katz, 2002).”
Relationships Between Open Source Software Companies and Communities: Observations from Nordic Firms (2005, background): “This is partly related to the notion of innovation tool-kits (von Hippel and Katz, 2002), but does not necessarily have to do with outsourcing need-related innovations to users, but rather in governing the infrastructure in the intersection between the firm and the community.”