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 also possible for...

A detailed survey of 498 high technology small and medium-sized enterprises in the Netherlands shows process innovation by user firms to be common practice. Fifty-four percent of these firms reported developing entirely novel process equipment or software for their own use and/or modifying...

The impact of user innovation on social welfare isanalyzed by comparing user innovators to manufacturer innovators in terms oftheir innovation incentives and knowledge.Following a review of theliterature on product development by users, it is argued that the introductionof user innovation in a...

Presents a series of studies showing that the sources of innovation vary greatly; possible sources include innovation users, suppliers of innovation-related components, and product manufacturers. These types of roles are known as functional areas. Specific areas of innovation are marked by...

Innovation development, production, distribution and consumption networks can be built up horizontally – with actors consisting only of innovation users (more precisely, "user/self-manufacturers"). Some open source software projects are examples of such networks, and examples can be found in...

Informal innovation has been investigated in numerous countries, but its incidence in developing countries, and relationship with informal business development, has been unexplored. This study explores 1. the nature of informal innovation in a developing country (South Africa), 2. its...

Innovation development, production, distribution and consumption networks can be built up horizontally with actors consisting only of innovation users (more precisely, user/self-manufacturers ). Some open source software projects are examples of such networks, and examples can be found in the...

Firms and governments are increasingly interested in learning to exploit the value of lead user innovations for commercial advantage. Improvements to lead user theory are needed to inform and guide these efforts. In this paper we empirically test and confirm the basic tenants of lead user...

This research note reports upon the first survey of household sector innovation in China. Compared to previous survey studies we add two first-of-kind variables and related findings.First, we include data on individual income, a resource-related antecedent of household sector innovation. We find...

Those who solve more of a given type of problem tend to get better at it — which suggests that problems of any given type should be brought to specialists for a solution. However, in this paper we argue that agency-related costs and information transfer costs (‘‘sticky'' local information)...