Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and
Open Innovation
by Dietmar Harhoff (Author), Karim R. Lakhani (Author)
The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary
growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process that
emphasizes users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now
routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation approaches to solve
important technological and organizational problems. This view of innovation,
pioneered by the economist Eric von Hippel, counters the dominant paradigm,
which cast the profit-seeking incentives of firms as the main driver of
technical change. In a series of influential writings, von Hippel and
colleagues found empirical evidence that flatly contradicted the
producer-centered model of innovation. Since then, the study of user-driven
innovation has continued and expanded, with further empirical exploration of a
distributed model of innovation that includes communities and platforms in a
variety of contexts and with the development of theory to explain the economic
underpinnings of this still emerging paradigm. This volume provides a
comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of the field of user and open
innovation, reflecting advances in the field over the last several decades. The
contributors -- including many colleagues of Eric von Hippel -- offer both
theoretical and empirical perspectives from such diverse fields as economics,
the history of science and technology, law, management, and policy. The
empirical contexts for their studies range from household goods to financial
services. After discussing the fundamentals of user innovation, the contributors
cover communities and innovation; legal aspects of user and community
innovation; new roles for user innovators; user interactions with firms; and
user innovation in practice, describing experiments, toolkits, and
crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding. Contributors Efe Aksuyek, Yochai Benkler,
James Bessen, Jorn H. Block, Annika Bock, Helena Canhao, Jeroen P. J. de Jong,
Emmanuelle Fauchart, Dominique Foray, Nikolaus Franke, Johann Fuller, Helena
Garriga, Fred Gault, Fredrik Hacklin, Dietmar Harhoff, Joachim Henkel,
Cornelius Herstatt, Christoph Hienerth, Venkat Kuppuswamy, Karim R. Lakhani,
Christopher Lettl, Christian Luthje, Ethan Mollick, Hidehiko Nishikawa,
Alessandro Nuvolari, Susumu Ogawa, Pedro Oliveira, Stefan Perkmann Berger,
Frank Piller, Christina Raasch, Susanne Roiser, Fabrizio Salvador, Pamela
Samuelson, Tim Schweisfurth, Sonali K. Shah, Christoph Stockstrom, Katherine J.
Strandburg, Stefan Thomke, Andrew W. Torrance, Mary Tripsas, Georg von Krogh.