User innovation

User innovation refers to innovation by intermediate users (e.g. user firms) or consumer users (individual end-users or user communities), rather than by suppliers (producers or manufacturers).

Eric von Hippel and others observed that many products and services are actually developed or at least refined, by users, at the site of implementation and use. These ideas are then moved back into the supply network. This is because products are developed to meet the widest possible need; when individual users face problems that the majority of consumers do not, they have no choice but to develop their own modifications to existing products, or entirely new products, to solve their issues. Often, user innovators will share their ideas with manufacturers in hopes of having them produce the product, a process called free revealing.

Based on research on the evolution of Internet technologies and open source software Ilkka Tuomi (Tuomi 2002) further highlighted the point that users are fundamentally social. User innovation, therefore, is also socially and socio-technically distributed innovation. According to Tuomi, key uses are often unintended uses invented by user communities that reinterpret and reinvent the meaning of emerging technological opportunities.

The existence of user innovation, for example, by users of industrial robots, rather than the manufacturers of robots (Fleck 1988) is a core part of the argument against the Linear Innovation Model (Williams 1996) i.e. innovation comes from research and development, is then marketed and 'diffuses' to end-users. Instead innovation is a non-linear process involving innovations at all stages

In 1986 Eric von Hippel introduced the lead user method that can be used to systematically learn about user innovation in order to apply it in new product development. In 2007 another specific type of user innovator, the creative consumer was introduced. These are consumers who adapt, modify, or transform a proprietary offering as opposed to creating completely new products.

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