Quotes About Development

inventory-management systems, such as retailers, tend to be the developers of new approaches to inventory management. In contrast, manufacturers of inventory-management systems and equipment tend to develop improvements to the

begin this chapter by reviewing the evidence that many users indeed do develop and modify products for their own use in many fields. I then show that innovation is concentrated among lead users, and that lead users' innovations often become commercial products.

The evidence on user innovation frequency and pervasiveness is summarized in table 2.1. We see here that the frequency with which user firms and individual consumers develop or modify products for their own use range from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent in fields studied to date.

frequency with which user firms and individual consumers develop or

this chapter by reviewing the evidence that many users indeed do develop and modify products for their own use

error information" that they gained. (In the trial-and-error formulation of the learning process, error is the new information or learning derived from an experiment by an experimenter: it is the aspect(s) of the outcome that the experimenter did not predict.) Developers then use the new learning to modify and improve the solution under development before building and running a new trial (figure 5.1).

for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual

Pamela Morrison, William Riggs, John Roberts, Stephan Schrader, Mary Sonnack, Stefan Thomke, Marcie Tyre

user-centered innovation process just illustrated is in sharp contrast

individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed

When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services-both firms and individual consumers-are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want

Second, lead users are a much broader category than customers of a specific firm, and many have incentives that differ from those of customers. Lead users generating innovations of interest to manufacturers can reside, as we have seen, at the leading edges of target markets, and also in advanced analog markets. The innovations that some of these develop are certainly disruptive from the viewpoint of some manufacturers—

have been found to be highly correlated

many libraries now have in-house programming expertise. Computerized search methods for libraries were initially developed by advanced and technically sophisticated user institutions. Development began in the United States in the 1970s with work by

Empirical studies show that many users—from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent—engage in developing or modifying products. About half of these studies do not determine representative innovation frequencies; they were designed for other purposes. Nonetheless, when taken together, the findings make it very clear that users are doing a lot of product modification and product development in many fields.

directed by some amount of insight as to the direction in which a solution might lie (Baron 1988). Trial and error has also been found to be prominent in the problem-solving work of product and process development (Marples 1961; Allen 1966; von Hippel and Tyre 1995; Thomke 1998, 2003). Trial-and-error problem solving can be envisioned as a four-phase cycle that is typically repeated many

client and make something that they expect to be a more general solution instead. The contrasting incentives of users and

example, developed the World Wide Web as a lead user working at CERN. The World Wide Web was certainly

I conclude this chapter by reminding the reader that studies of the sources of innovation show clearly that users will tend to develop some types of innovations but not all. It therefore makes sense for manufacturers to partition their product-development strategies and portfolios accordingly.

and services-both firms and individual consumers-are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay

universities and the Library of Congress, with support provided by grants from the federal government (Tedd 1994). Until roughly 1978, the only such systems extant were those that had been developed by libraries for their own use. In the late 1970s, the first commercial

Research provides a firm grounding for these empirical findings. The two defining characteristics of lead users and the likelihood that they will develop new or modified products have been found to be highly correlated (Morrison et al.

Eric von Hippel

windsurfing, and a large fraction of the boards sold incorporated the user-developed innovations for the high-performance sport. The user-centered innovation