Comparing Business and Household Sector Innovation in Consumer Products: Findings from a Representative Study in the United Kingdom

By Eric von Hippel, Jeroen de Jong, Stephen Flowers. 2012

214 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a first survey of its type, we measure development and modification of consumer products by product users in a representative sample of 1,173 UK consumers age 18 and older. We estimate this previously unmeasured type of household sector innovation to be quite large: 6.1% of UK consumers---nearly 2.9 million individuals---have engaged in consumer product innovation during the prior three years. In aggregate, consumers' annual product development expenditures are more than 1.4 times larger than the annual consumer product R&D expenditures of all firms in the United Kingdom combined. Consumers engage in many small projects that seem complementary to the innovation efforts of incumbent producers. Consumer innovators very seldom protect their innovations via intellectual property, and 17% diffuse to others. These results imply that, at the country level, productivity studies yield inflated effect sizes for producer innovation in consumer goods. They also imply that existing companies should reconfigure their product development systems to find and build on prototypes developed by consumers. This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Subfields: Marketing, Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f2a516949088c8b1770b00196d75b70defabb7ba

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Citations in the corpus

Market Failure in the Diffusion of Consumer-Developed Innovations: Patterns in Finland (2015, unknown): “…all three nations was found to be very broad, ranging from improvements to vehicles, to products used in patient home care, to improvements in sporting products In the UK, von Hippel et al. (2012) estimated that consumer-developers on average spent 7.1 days and £ 1098 out-of-pocket costs per year .”
User Community vs. Producer Innovation Development Efficiency: A First Empirical Study (2013, background): “In the US, 16 million people (5.2% of the US population) collectively spend $20.2 billion, and in Japan, 4.7 million people (3.7% of the population) collectively spend $5.8 billion to create and modify user products for their own use (von Hippel et al. 2012; Ogawa and Pongtanalert 2011).”
Impacts of Hedonic and Utilitarian User Motives on the Innovativeness of User-Developed Solutions: Motives for User-Developed Solutions (2015, unknown): “These include enjoyment of the innovation development task itself (Hienerth, 2006; Ogawa and Pongtanalert, 2011; von Hippel et al., 2012), learning/skill improvement (Bin, 2013; Hienerth, 2006; Lakhani and Wolf, 2005), and helping others (Kogut and Metiu, 2001; Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003).”
Democratizing Innovation and Capital Access: The Role of Crowdfunding (2016, background): “Almost a third of these innovations were considered to be the first of their kind, and a quarter were ultimately adopted by others.(1) Indeed, decades of research have shown that users of technology, rather than manufacturers, create key innovations across industry areas ranging from”