This paper examines the extent to which users in developing countries innovate, and whether these innovations are meaningful on a global stage. To study this issue, we conducted an empirical investigation into the origin and types of innovations in financial services offered via mobile phones, a...

Prior research has shown that some patients and caregivers such as relatives are innovating in relation to their unmet medical needs. However, there is little evidence whether and how these ideas are later implemented into market-ready solutions and subsequently commercialized. We analyze cases...

Many services can be self-provided. An individual user or a user firm can, for example, choose to do its own accounting – choose to self-provide that service – instead of hiring an accounting firm to provide it. Since users can ‘serve themselves’ in many cases, it is reasonable to...

Patients with rare diseases, as well as their caregivers, sometimes develop new solutions to deal with their health conditions but only a small fraction share the solution with their doctor or other health professionals. When the value of patient developed solutions is considered, the evidence...

Prior research has shown that some patients and caregivers such as relatives are innovating in relation to their unmet medical needs. However, there is little evidence whether and how these ideas are later implemented into market-ready solutions and subsequently commercialized. We analyze cases...

We investigate the motives and activities of individual user innovators in healthcare, focusing on patients of various diseases. More specifically we investigate the role of patients in the development of new treatments, therapies or medical devices (TT&MD). Whereas producers typically benefit...

While the user-innovation literature has considered firms as potential user-innovators, little is known about the individual contributions by employees of producer-firms, who innovate to address their own specific needs within their firm, and which we refer to as employee-users. We investigate...

Distributed innovation in the form of open- and user innovation affects the evolution of the market. This paper presents an agent-based model where the agents are users and firms that both seek to reap the benefits of innovation. We use this model to examine the interaction between firms and...

As ethnography branches into the fields of business, marketing research, innovation and design research, anthropologists working outside academic contexts are developing a set of practices that in many ways mirror the work of academic anthropology and in other ways diverge from it. Drawing from...