User toolkits for innovation

By Eric von Hippel. 2001

481 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Manufacturers must accurately understand user needs in order to develop successful products-but the task is becoming steadily more difficult as user needs change more rapidly, and as firms increasingly seek to serve “markets of one.” User toolkits for innovation allow manufacturers to actually abandon their attempts to understand user needs in detail in favor of transferring need-related aspects of product and service development to users along with an appropriate toolkit. User toolkits for innovation are specific to given product or service type and to a specified production system. Within those general constraints, they give users real freedom to innovate, allowing them to develop their custom product via iterative trial-and-error. That is, users can create a preliminary design, simulate or prototype it, evaluate its functioning in their own use environment, and then iteratively improve it until satisfied. As the concept is evolving, toolkits guide the user to insure that the completed design can be produced on the intended production system without change. Pioneering applications in areas ranging from the development of custom integrated circuits to the development of custom foods show that user toolkits for innovation can be much more effective than traditional, manufacturer-based development methods.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc853b50fd2cba57de022d4709f47430312ed188

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In Computer Science Applications

In Management of Technology and Innovation

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Citations in the corpus

Introduction to the Special Issue with Best Papers from BPM 2008 Workshops (2010, unknown): “Some enterprises have gained competitive advantage by having a community of innovative users connected with the enterprise’s product [48,49].”
Consumers as Co-developers: Learning and Innovation Outside the Firm (2003, background): “While innovative consumer communities can emerge also in face-to-face settings (Franke et al., 2003), the technical milieu of this case is extraordinary in facilitating interaction.”
Collaborating to create: The Internet as a platform for customer engagement in product innovation (2005, background): “Toolkits for user innovation can be created to exploit new technologies such as computer simulation in order to make NPD faster and less costly (von Hippel, 2001; Thomke & von Hippel, 2002).”
Code Reuse in Open Source Software (2008, background): “Empirical studies of Apache and Linux developers have demonstrated that a strong incentive for developing open source software is to solve a technical problem by writing software code and getting feedback from other users (von Hippel, 2001; Hertel et al. 2003).”
Product uniqueness as a driver of customer utility in mass customization (2008, background): “Most contributions to date have stressed the increased "aesthetic and functional fit" of MC products resulting from the possibility of selfcustomization (e.g., Dellaert and Stremersch 2005, Simonson 2005, von Hippel 2001, Wind and Rangaswamy 2001).”
Overcoming Mass Confusion: Collaborative Customer Co-Design in Online Communities (2005, methodology): “Taking up an expression from von Hippel (2001), we use the term “toolkits” for customer co-design in the following.”
Technology Push and Demand Pull Perspectives in Innovation Studies: Current Findings and Future Research Directions (2012, unknown): “…Hippel, 1994) and with the tools that can be used to absorb their knowledge to stimulate the development of innovations (e.g., Nambisan, 2002; von Hippel, 2001) and the collective mechanisms of collaboration related to open-source innovation (Lakhani and von Hippel, 2003; von Hippel and von…”
Harnessing the Creative Potential among Users (2004, unknown): “This is why researchers propose user involvement, during the development process, as a means of increasing the likelihood of new product success (von Hippel, 2001).”
The value increment of mass-customized products: An empirical assessment (2006, background): “Insert Figure 1 about here Going beyond mean statistics, we find that toolkits for mass customization might not be suited to every customer (von Hippel, 2001).”
Virtual product experience and customer participation—A chance for customer-centred, really new products (2007, background): “In literature, a number of new tools to interact virtually with customers can be found (von Hippel, 2001; von Hippel and Katz, 2002).”
Living Lab: A Methodology between User‐Centred Design and Participatory Design (2014, unknown): “Eric Von Hippel has investigated the crucial role of lead users in the innovation process, demonstrating that lead users can significantly contribute to the development of innovation beyond highlighting or demonstrating their needs (Von Hippel, 2001 and 2005).”
Utilizing customer knowledge in innovation: antecedents and impact of customer involvement on new product performance (2015, unknown): “A firm with strong strategic flexibility is able to achieve these changes more quickly and at a lower cost and is thus better equipped to engage in CIN (Nambisan 2002; von Hippel 2001).”