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...

When economists and innovation practitioners think about whether developing an innovation will be worthwhile, they tend to think exclusively about the economic value of the outcome of the innovation process. In this article, we develop and explore the idea that innovators can also gain...

In the traditional new product development process, manufacturers first explore user needs and then develop responsive products. Developing an accurate understanding of a user need is not simple or fast or cheap, however. As a result, the traditional approach is coming under increasing strain as...

We provide the first empirical exploration of disease-related innovation by patients and their caregivers. Our aims were to measure the frequency of innovation by these patients and their caregivers, and the improvement in well-being they experienced from using what they have developed. In...

In this paper, we report findings from a first nationally-representative survey of household sector innovation in China, and offer two major new findings to that literature stream. First, we find that 23.2 million Chinese citizens are household innovators when we include householders who develop...

The rise of free goods and the digital revolution have generated new interest in household activities and how they should be measured. Earlier research considered other household activities, including household production and human capital accumulation. Yet, one important household activity,...

I define a ‘system of use’ as a collection of components that interact during use to accomplish a system-level goal. For example, all the products and behaviors that a tennis player combines and applies when playing tennis – tennis racket, tennis shoes, tennis game strategy, serving...

A central tenant of open innovation is free revealing of the detailed workings of novel products and services, so that others may use them, learn from them, and perhaps improve them as well. We explain that innovators frequently do freely reveal proprietary information and knowledge regarding...

The "lead user construct" was developed to preferentially identify commercially attractive innovation-related information developed by users of products and services. In this research, we use data drawn from users of Apache, an open source software project, to assess the association between each...