User Community vs. Producer Innovation Development Efficiency: A First Empirical Study
By Christoph Hienerth, Eric von Hippel, Morten B. Jensen. 2013
180 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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 3× more efficient at developing important kayaking product innovations than were producers in aggregate. We speculate that this result is driven by what we term “efficiencies of scope” in problem-solving. These can favor an aggregation of many user innovators, each spending a little, over fewer producer innovators benefitting from higher economies of scale in product development. We also note that the present study explores only one initial point on what is likely to be a complex efficiency landscape.
Subfields: Business and International Management, Computer Science Applications, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7023497350cc735d1ce87ba982ce0efc2e86be2c
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In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Plastic recycling in additive manufacturing: A systematic literature review and opportunities for the circular economy (2020, background): “This enables an alternative option from an economy-of-scale to an economy-of-scope, where the products are highly personalized satisfying niche communities or even individuals (Hienerth et al., 2014; Petrick and Simpson, 2013).”
- Impacts of Hedonic and Utilitarian User Motives on the Innovativeness of User-Developed Solutions: Motives for User-Developed Solutions (2015, unknown): “User innovator respondents were asked to “divide up 100 points according to relative importance” among a list of five possible motivations for engaging in that activity (Hienerth et al., 2014; Kuusisto, de Jong, Gault, Raasch, and von Hippel, 2013).”
- Pretrained AI Models: Performativity, Mobility, and Change (2019, background): “Von Hippel and colleagues have noted a kind of division of labor in types of innovations pursued by producers and users for scientific instruments [77] and whitewater kayak-ing [31].”