Studies 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 firm-established user communities users freely reveal...

This 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...

Although organisational structure has sometimes been mentioned in evolutionary economics as well as in the innovation literature as a possible determinant of innovation performance, very little systematic theoretical and empirical work exist on this issue. In this paper, we take our theoretical...

Modding – the modification of existing products by consumers – is increasingly exploited by manufacturers to enhance product development and sales. In the computer games industry modding has evolved into a development model in which users act as unpaid “complementors” to manufacturers’...

Leading firms have begun to offer “user toolkits for innovation”. User toolkits are seen as a means to eliminate (costly) iterations of need-related-information between users and producers in the product development process because toolkits allow users to perform need-related aspects of...