The problems associated with measuring success in small businesses are primarily caused by a lack of comparable data due to the ambiguity of "success" and by subjective biases. Success evaluation is dominated by the estimates of business owners, who tend to overestimate overall success and...

In this study, we analyze the commercialization process of user innovations in open communities. We have traced 16 cases of user innovators who have commercialized their own innovations or have been involved in the commercialization process to some extent. By developing and manufacturing new...

Identifying appropriate criteria for evaluatingsuccess is acommon problem in the analysis of small family businesses.Definitions and measurement of success are ambiguous due to subjective biasesand a variety of personal goals and company objectives; definitions andmeasurements are not comparable...

There is increasing consensus among practitioners and academics alike that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift from producer-centered and internal innovation processes toward user-centered and open innovation processes. This paradigm shift induces significant changes to the design of...

In this paper we report upon a first empirical exploration of the relative efficiency of innovation development by product users vs. product producers. In a study of over 50 years of product innovation in the whitewater kayaking field, we find users in aggregate were approximately 3X more...