1,720,979 research outputs found
User Toolkits for Innovation: Consumers Support Each Other
No full textUser toolkits for innovation were recently proposed as a means to eliminate (costly)
exchange of need-related information between users and manufactures in the product
development process. The method transfers certain development tasks to users
and thereby empowers them to create their own desired product features. This article
examines the implications of different levels of opportunities for consumer involvement
(OCI) in product development to learn what happens when firms pass
design tasks on to consumers. It explores this issue by studying the relation between
the employment of user toolkits and the need for firms to support their consumers.
An analysis of 78 computer games products and the amount of support given by
firms to the consumers of these products suggests that a share of the costs firms save
on information acquisition by letting consumers ‘‘do it themselves’’ may eventually
reemerge as costs in consumer support. In other words, an increase in opportunities
for consumer involvement seems to increase the need for supporting consumers.
A promising solution to the problem of support costs is identified, namely, the establishment
of consumer–consumer support interaction. A case study of an outlier in
terms of firm support to consumers—Westwood Studios—shows that consumers
who use toolkits may be willing to support each other. Such interactive problem
solving in a firm-established user community is advantageous to the firm, because
the process reduces the amount of resources that the firm itself needs to dedicate to
the support of consumers using toolkits. Generally, consumer-to-consumer interaction
can facilitate problem-solving in the consumer domain, can aid the diffusion
of toolkit related knowledge, and potentially can enhance the outcomes produced by
the toolkit approach.
Introduction
Successful product development deals effectively
with information costs. A crucial consideration
of conventional market research is how to
economize on the acquisition of reliable need-related
information that allows product developers to create
exactly the products consumers want
Complimentary complements? Two-sided markets with free goods and suppliers who don't get paid
No full textNo abstract availabl
Getting unusual suspects to solve R&D puzzles.
No full textFor even the toughest of R&D problems,
there are often people out there with
innovative solutions already on their
shelves or in their back pockets. The trick
for corporate executives is finding and
gaining access to those individuals. Our
research with a company that broadcasts
technological problems into the ether –
and gets back solid results – has given
us a profile of the kind of people most
likely to solve R&D puzzles. We wonder
whether firms might be able to emulate
this method to draw new insights from
the talents and expertise of their own
employees
The Role of Lead users in Knowledge Sharing
No full textThis paper introduces a model of knowledge sharing in an online community of practice that suggests that knowledge contributions will be made by those who possess the relevant knowledge. For them,
matching a ready-made solution to a problem is low cost. We hypothesize that lead users – due to their characteristics – are likely to possess more relevant solution knowledge and thus be centrally involved in contributing knowledge. Our results support the hypothesis by showing that lead user characteristics relate positively to making contributions to the community. In addition, we find that search and integration of knowledge from different external sources of relevance to the community positively moderates knowledge contributions by lead users
Why do users contribute to firm-hosted user communities? The case of computer-controlled music instruments.
No full textStudies of the sources of innovations have recognized that many innovations are developed by users. However, the fact
that firms employ communities of users to strengthen their innovation process has not yet received much attention. In
online firm-hosted user communities, users freely reveal innovations to a firm’s product platform, which can put the firm in
a favorable position (a) because these new product features become available to all users through sharing on a user-to-user
basis, or (b) because it allows the firm to pick up the innovations and integrate them in future products and then benefit by
selling them to all users. We study the key personal attributes of the individuals responsible for innovations, namely the
innovative users, to explain creation of value in this organizational context. The main question is why such users contribute
to firm-hosted user communities. Analyzing data derived from multiple sources (interviews, a Web-log, and questionnaires),
we find that innovative users are likely to be (i) hobbyists, an attribute that can be assumed to (positively) affect innovators’
willingness to share innovations, and (ii) responsive to “firm recognition” as a motivating factor for undertaking innovation,
which explains their decision to join the firm’s domain. In agreement with earlier studies, we also find that innovative
users are likely to be “lead users,” an attribute that we assume to affect the quality of user innovation. Whether or not a
firm-hosted user community can be turned into an asset for the firm is to a great extent conditional on the issues studied
in this paper
Competing With A Crowd Informally Organized Individuals As Platform Complementors
No full textPlatform complementors are increasingly organized as “crowds” of individual producers working outside formal relationships–rather than as complementor firms. As crowds are motivated differently from firms in a market, here we hypothesize that the best way to stimulate complementary development differs from usual “grow-the-platform” strategies known from earlier platform studies. In crowd complementary development on online multiplayer games, we find that strategies intended to stimulate crowd complementary development by boosting platform usage did so (elasticity of .45), even when the crowd received no cash payments from users. However, boosting the size of the crowd itself had no impact on subsequent development rates or network effects. We found evidence that strategies more directly geared to inducing complementary innovation (i.e., an inducement prize) had much greater impact
Consumers as Co-developers: Learning and Innovation Outside the Firm
No full textThis study describes a process in which a firm relies on an external consumer community
for innovation. While it has been recognized that users may sometimes innovate, little is known about
what commercial firms can do to motivate and capture such innovations and their related benefits. We
contribute to strategy literature by suggesting that learning and innovation efforts from which a firm may
benefit need not necessarily be located within the organization, but may well reside in the consumer
environment. We also contribute to the existing theory on ‘user-driven innovation’ by showing what firms
purposively can do to generate consumer innovation efforts. An explorative case study shows that consumer
innovation can be structured, motivated, and partly organized by a commercial firm that organizes the
infrastructure for consumers’ interactive learning in a public online domain
Learning in innovative customer communities
No full textDescribes how firms can access and leverage external knowledge by setting up and managing user communities
Unpaid Crowd Complementors: The Platform Network Effect Mirage
No full textPlatforms have evolved beyond just being organized as multi-sided markets with complementors selling to users. Complementors are often unpaid, working outside of a price system and driven by heterogeneous sources of motivation—which should affect how they respond to platform growth. Does reliance on network effects and strategies to attract large
numbers of complementors remain advisable in such contexts? We test hypotheses related to these issues using data from 85 online multi-player game platforms with unpaid complementors. We find that complementor development responds to platform growth even without sales incentives, but that attracting complementors has a net zero effect on on-going
development and fails to stimulate network effects. We discuss conditions under which a strategy of using unpaid crowd complementors remains advantageous
Marginality and Problem Solving Effectiveness in Broadcast Search
Full text linkWe examine who the winners are in science problem solving contests characterized by open broadcast of problem information, self-selection of external solvers to discrete problems from the laboratories of large
R&D intensive companies and blind review of solution submissions. Analyzing a unique dataset of 166 science challenges involving over 12,000 scientists revealed that technical and social marginality, being a source of different perspectives and heuristics, plays an important role in explaining individual success in problem solving. The provision of a winning solution was positively related to increasing distance between the solver’s field of technical expertise and the focal field of the problem. Female solvers – known to be in
the “outer circle” of the scientific establishment - performed significantly better than men in developing successful solutions. Our findings contribute to the emerging literature on open and distributed innovation by demonstrating the value of openness, at least narrowly defined by disclosing problems, in removing barriers to entry to non-obvious individuals. We also contribute to the knowledge-based theory of the firm by showing the effectiveness of a market-mechanism to draw out knowledge from diverse external sources to solve internal problems.Accepted Manuscrip
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