Toward Open Access for Innovation : Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the Netherlands

Recently, the view that diffusion of high speed broadband networks is primarily driven by competition or government intervention (OECD, 2007) has been challenged by the emergence of broadband initiatives at the local community level across the globe which seems to point that at a more active role of users in the process of broadband diffusion. In the literature, it has been assumed that residential consumers chose different forms of broadband based on certain combinations of price and product characteristics. With the concept of “sticky information”, von Hippel (1994) has provided a main argument to examine the problem of user involvement in innovation related to the uniqueness of their knowledge base. The data used for the analysis were collected with the help of an on-line survey in July 2009 involving 2,682 respondents. The paper showed that local and complementary knowledge of residential users have been important in their broadband adoption