Users as inventors and developers of radical innovation:An explorative case study analysisin the field of medical technology

Our study focuses on the question, whether users should be intensively involved in the innovation process of radical product innovations or better not – from the manufacturer’s perspective. Radical innovations incorporate new technologies, shift market structures, require intensive user learning and induce significant behavior changes. Due to these specifics the question arises, whether users play a productive role in the innovation process of radical innovations at all, or if their contributions might even be counterproductive. To gain a better understanding for the users’ role in radical innovation and to develop a differentiated view of their contributions, we have studied three dimensions of user involvement were studied: (1) Which characteristics enable users to contribute to the innovation process? (2) How do manufacturers need to interact with users to benefit from their contributions? (3) How does user involvement impact on the manufacturer? We focused our study on the early phases of the innovation process. Two phases were distinquished for the analysis of these questions: Idea gen-eration and development. This distinction allows us to analyse the role of users within separate phases of the innovation process. Based on relevant theories and empirical work a set of propositions was formulated for each dimension. To study the addressed research questions, an explorative case study analysis was conducted in the field of medical technology. Five radical innovation projects were selected including medical robots, navigation systems, and biocompatible implants. In-depth inter-views were conducted with marketing, R&D, project leaders, CEO’s, and users. A content analysis framework was applied to systematically analyse the collected data.The case studies reveal that users with a unique set of characteristics (motivation, competencies, contextual factors) were able to deliver major contributions in all three phases...