'Customer-developed innovation' : Conceptual extension and empirical research

Abstract

This paper offers a critique of von Hippel's 'customer-active paradigm' of industrial innovation. Whilst acknowledge that this perspective offers a step forward from the previous assumption that manufacturers alone were responsible for product innovation, the paper arques for the conceptual extension of the new paradigm. The possibility of users being directly invovled in product innovation should be unambigiously included in the reconceptualisqation of customer-developed innovation. To the extent of their being entrepreneurially aware of new product oppurtunities, users may initiatethe process of product innovation,not only by producing ideas and designs but by the collection of marketing intelligence to rreduce the uncertainties of the commercial exploitation of innovations. Their doing so is evidence of this active involvement in product innovation and disconfirms the essentially passive role in that process assumed by the customer-active paradigm.