Comparing Business and Household Sector Innovation in Consumer Products: Findings from a Representative Study in the United Kingdom

Eric von Hippel (), Jeroen P. J. de Jong () and Stephen Flowers ()
Additional contact information
Eric von Hippel: MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts 02142
Jeroen P. J. de Jong: Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, 3062 PA Rotterdam, The Netherlands; and EIM Business and Policy Research, 2701 AA Zoetermeer, The Netherlands
Stephen Flowers: Centre for Research in Innovation Management, University of Brighton, East Sussex BN1 9QE, United Kingdom

Management Science, 2012, vol. 58, issue 9, 1669-1681

Abstract: In a first survey of its type, we measure development and modification of consumer products by product users in a representative sample of 1,173 UK consumers age 18 and older. We estimate this previously unmeasured type of household sector innovation to be quite large: 6.1% of UK consumers--nearly 2.9 million individuals--have engaged in consumer product innovation during the prior three years. In aggregate, consumers' annual product development expenditures are more than 1.4 times larger than the annual consumer product R&D expenditures of all firms in the United Kingdom combined. Consumers engage in many small projects that seem complementary to the innovation efforts of incumbent producers. Consumer innovators very seldom protect their innovations via intellectual property, and 17% diffuse to others. These results imply that, at the country level, productivity studies yield inflated effect sizes for producer innovation in consumer goods. They also imply that existing companies should reconfigure their product development systems to find and build on prototypes developed by consumers. This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Keywords: user innovation; consumer innovation; measurement; research and development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (48)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1110.1508 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:58:y:2012:i:9:p:1669-1681

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().