Surveying innovation in samples of individual end consumers
18 Pages Posted: 23 Jun 2012 Last revised: 25 Jan 2016
Date Written: January 25, 2016
Abstract
Rather than businesses, individual end consumers may develop innovations for themselves. Typically such innovators are not bothered with protecting their innovation-related knowledge, a phenomenon recently coined as ‘free innovation’ (von Hippel, E. (in press), Free Innovation, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA). End consumers typically innovate for other reasons than commercial gains: personal use benefits, fun, learning, or helping others. This paper takes stock of how innovation by individual consumers has been measured, and proposes a survey procedure for future studies of consumer innovation. I provide a literature review of how innovation by individual end consumers has been measured, and report on four pilots studies conducted in Finland to improve and standardize its measurement. The standardized survey procedure includes up to six steps, and can be tailored to researchers’ resources and purposes. The procedure will enable better international/cross-study comparisons and an efficient collection of data.
Keywords: User innovation, Measurement
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
How User Innovations Become Commercial Products: A Theoretical Investigation and Case Study
By Christoph Hienerth, Eric A. Von Hippel, ...
-
The Accidental Entrepreneur: The Emergent and Collective Process of User Entrepreneurship
By Sonali Shah and Mary Tripsas
-
Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation
-
Users as Innovators: A Review, Critique, and Future Research Directions
By Marcel Bogers, Allan Afuah, ...
-
By Sonali Shah
-
By Fred Gault and Eric A. Von Hippel
-
Users as Service Innovators: The Case of Banking Services
By Pedro Oliveira and Eric A. Von Hippel
-
When Do User Innovators Start Firms? A Theory of User Entrepreneurship
By Sonali Shah and Mary Tripsas
-
By Eric A. Von Hippel, Jeroen P.j. De Jong, ...
-
Visualizing Invisible Innovation Continent: Evidence from Global Consumer Innovation Surveys