International Journal of Innovation Management

An increasing number of corporations engage with users in co-innovation of products and services. But there are a number of competing perspectives on how best to integrate these understandings into existing corporate innovation development processes. This paper maps out three of the dominant approaches, compares them in terms of goals, methods and basic philosophy, and shows how they may beneficially enrich one another. We will present an industrial innovation case that has been instrumental to the development of what we have termed "Participatory Innovation". Based on this, we will list the challenges such an approach sets to innovation management, and discuss research directions of what we see as fundamental to the development of the field of user-driven innovation.

This paper addresses three different approaches which can be employed to adequately answer different questions faced by product developers. These approaches differ in the ways users themselves are involved in developing the "real" user perspective. In participatory design, products and product concepts are developed together with users so that they fit better with what the users do and want to do. The modelling of product adoption quantifies the likely market adoption of products, based on user characteristics and product attributes. The evaluation of user experience describes a way to evaluate products in terms of their users' interaction with the product daily life. These approaches have originated from different areas and are often seen as competing viewpoints. This paper shows that the three approaches be seen as complementary to each other and suggests a method for to choose the right approach.

This paper explores the role of intermediaries in the development and appropriation of new technologies. We focus on intermediaries that facilitate user innovation, and the linking of user innovation into supply side activities. We review findings on intermediaries in some of our studies and other available literature to build a framework to explore of how intermediaries work in making innovation happen. We make sense of these processes by taking a long-term view of the dynamics of technology and market development using the social learning in technological innovation (SLTI) framework. Our primary concern is with innovation intermediaries and their core roles of configuring, facilitating and brokering technologies, uses and relationships in uncertain and emerging markets. We show the range of positions and influence they have along the supply-use axis in a number of different innovation contexts, and how they are able to bridge the user-developer innovation domains. Equipped with these insights, we explore in more depth how intermediaries affect the shape of new information and communication technologies and the importance of identifying and nurturing the user-side intermediaries that are crucial to innovation success.

The development and rapid consumer adoption of energy efficiency products and renewable energy systems are key elements of the UK and the EU carbon reduction strategies to meet the challenge of climate change. Many such technologies are available for domestic use, but despite government incentives to meet carbon reduction targets consumer adoption has been slow. This Open University research with 111 in-depth interviews plus an on-line survey with nearly 400 responses, investigates consumer adoption, non-adoption and use of these technologies. Results show that it is important to research consumer use experiences, problems and requirements when designing and developing "green" technologies. With results tailored to each technology, this study shows that user-centred improvements are required to improve functionality, ergonomics, inter-connectedness with other systems and symbolic value, and to reduce cost and payback. User-centred research supports new product/system design and development to promote more rapid adoption and carbon-saving use of energy efficient and renewable technologies in homes.

The focus of this study is on how online brand communities are utilised throughout the new product development (NPD) process by promoting communications between firms and communities. We investigate leading MP3 player manufacturers and mobile phone handset manufacturers in Korea. The results of our case studies show that the roles of online brand communities vary along the NPD stages — from trendsetters (lead users) to innovation facilitators (users as innovators), and information disseminators (early adopters). These communities can help firms gain insight into customer needs, desirable characteristics of new products and trends for future development. Furthermore, various inputs from online brand communities can stimulate firms' internal communication among several departments involved in the NPD. Finally, this study suggests the extended research model and generates hypotheses on the roles and impacts of online brand communities.

Users have proven to be a principal driving force of many innovations in different industries. Therefore, more and more firms try to identify avenues to systematically involve users into their new product development. Despite the growing interest in user-driven or user-centred innovation, both in academia and industry, the drivers and impediments affecting the evolvement of user innovation activities over time have only recently become a focus of analysis. This study aims to examine user innovation over time and contribute to the extension of the existing model of user-driven innovation to a more dynamic setting. For this purpose, we study the evolution of user innovation in a field of sports equipment, a high-performance sailboat called Moth. We analyse innovation activities over several decades based on secondary data, interviews and survey results. We find that the level of user activity does not follow a unidirectional trend, but rather develops depending on a number of contextual factors. This suggests that, given a stimulating setting, user innovation can be sustained over long periods of time.

Recent studies of outlaw communities provide qualitative evidence of their existence and the organisation of the underlying innovation processes. We provide descriptive results from a large scale survey of two online outlaw communities focussing on Microsoft's XBox (a gaming console). Based on the previous findings, we identify two types of participants in outlaw communities — user innovators and adopters. Based on 2256 responses, we find that users modify their XBox mainly to be able to increase the set of available functions of their XBox. Users are also motivated to modify their XBox for the sake of having fun and to conduct pirate behaviour. Finally, results from our survey also suggest that user innovators are largely intrinsically motivated by fun and the intellectual stimulation of writing code for homebrew software.

Corporate innovation management geared to long-term success calls for a strategy to grow innovations into a substantial competitive advantage. This, however, coincides with an enormous failure-rate at the market, especially in the field of breakthrough innovations. Hence, in recent times, companies are trying to alleviate the risk of lacking user-acceptance through opening their innovation processes to external actors, particularly customers. The method of integrating lead users is determined by the effective and systematic identification of leading-edge customers, which is considered to be a critical phase within this approach. With the arrival of Web 2.0 applications, there is a huge potential to improve these selection processes. Our research into online communities and weblogs scrutinised the search criteria in an online environment and revealed the following characteristics as crucial factors for the online identification of lead users: being ahead of a market trend, high expected benefits, user expertise and motivation, extreme user needs as well as opinion leadership and an online commitment.

In order to study user-producer interaction (UPI) in emerging pharmaceutical and food innovation processes, a classification of user involvement has been developed, including a contextualised view on UPIs. Case studies are performed on two types of UPI: demand articulation in intermediary organisations and interactive learning in consortia, in the pharmaceutical and food sector, respectively.

Regarding demand articulation processes, articulation of problems, needs, demands and expectations through agenda-setting practices is important. Expression and evaluation of demands with other factors leads to moblization of creative potential of prospective users and facilitation of emerging innovation processes.

Regarding interactive learning, geographical, organisational, regulatory and cognitive proximity conditions could facilitate structures for emerging technology development, and codes and networks for frequent interaction between complementary stakeholders. Demands, concerns and opportunities are articulated by shared visions. Organised UPIs via intermediary user organisations or consortia seem to be the important tools for demand articulation and interactive learning involving patient organisations, researchers and private and public organisations.

Although various user-centric innovation concepts have proved successful in niche markets and specific industries, there is yet little understanding how these models may become more widely diffused in manufacturing industries. We apply an evolutionary economics perspective to explore possible transition pathways towards user-centric innovation paradigms. In order to understand not only the past but also possible future transition trajectories, we complement the co-evolution analysis with prospective elements such as scenario building and roadmapping. Using this combined approach, we identify possible future working configurations of user-centric innovation models and specify a number of diverse elements relevant on different levels of the transition arena. We argue that these insights can be used to define and set-up dedicated learning spaces for user-centric innovation. It is suggested that similar approaches may be useful for companies and policy actors to guide governance of change towards user-centric innovation models.

There are many techniques for the involvement of consumers to support the development of innovations, but knowledge is lacking in the appropriateness of different techniques in various situations. This is, especially, true for consumer involvement in radical innovation. This paper presents the requirements of consumer involvement in different situations, covering the two main phases of the development process, and specified for three types of radical product innovation. Based on a review of literature, we identified four characteristics of consumers-involvement techniques and developed a mix of differentiating characteristics for six situations in the new product development, which form the basis of a model to select the appropriate techniques. We then evaluated this model by using a historical comparative case-study approach. This paper contributes to the understanding of the appropriateness of different techniques for the proactive involvement of consumers to support the development of radical product innovations.

Novel information and communication technologies, foremost the Internet, have revolutionised the innovation landscape. Mass-collaboration involving end-users is now, a critical component of many types of software improvement and has the potential to make users as the main innovation source of the 21st century. The vision of democratising innovation is not, however, in everybody's interest. Many incumbent corporations are actively engaging in efforts to prevent users from modifying and improving their products. In this paper, we investigate the barriers that incumbents impose upon potentially innovative users and ask under which conditions such behaviours are likely to be sustainable.