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Leveraging User Innovation: Managing the Creative Potential of Individual Consumers

Submission 1st February 2014

Guest Editors

• Marcel Bogers, University of Southern Denmark
• Ian P. McCarthy, Simon Fraser University, Canada
• Leyland Pitt, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Users have long been identified as important sources of innovation (von Hippel, 1976; Lettl, 2007; Gales and Mansour-Cole, 1995). Research has focused on both intermediate users (e.g., user firms or B2B) and final consumer users (e.g., end users/communities or B2C) as sources of innovative products and services (Bogers et al., 2010). This special issue focuses on the different types of individuals or groups of individuals who undertake user innovation to produce new products and services (Berthon et al., 2007).

Recent research has highlighted the innovation potential of individual consumers who, in the UK, spend more time and money on innovation than all UK consumer product firms combined (von Hippel et al., 2012). Also, with the growing interest in open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003; Chesbrough et al., 2006), an increasing number of mechanisms, such as crowdsourcing (Poetz and Schreier, 2012) and social media (Kietzmann et al., 2011), exist to harness this potential. Such trends have major implications for innovation management education (Horwitch and Stohr, 2012) and thus offer numerous opportunities for interesting scholarly inquiry (see: West and Bogers, forthcoming). Consequently, this special issue’s topics of interest include, but are not limited, to the following:

• How can firms identify, evaluate, acquire and exploit the innovation-related knowledge produced by individual consumers? What processes should organizations employ to effectively learn from user innovators? How does user innovation by individuals impact the modes of learning, knowledge management and innovation in organizations?
• How do organizations promote and control user innovation? How do organizations measure the costs and benefits of learning and innovation outcomes and how can they design their organization and business models to profit from the creative potential of users, while also mitigating possible drawbacks and costs?
• To what extent and how are the boundaries of the firm affected when firms integrate users in their innovation process? What kinds of new organizational forms are arising to facilitate user innovation and how do these challenge our extant understanding of how to organize innovation activities? What are the implications for incumbent firms, when users start up their own business?
• How do we characterize different products and services to understand their impact on user innovation opportunities and challenges and their impact on the associated learning and knowledge management issues for organizations?
• How do the characteristics of different types of innovation (e.g., product, service, process, organization, marketing, etc.), as well as different types of user innovators (e.g., creative consumers, lead users, laggards, hackers, pirates, user designers, phreakers and jail breakers), influence how innovation takes place? How do these characteristics influence the learning and knowledge management opportunities/challenges faced by organizations? Such characteristics include the motivations of user innovators, the types of innovation activity they undertake (e.g., legal vs. illegal, incremental vs. radical) and how they innovate (e.g., individual vs. in communities).
• How does context (e.g., different industry types and different country cultures) affect the process of user innovation and the opportunities for organizations?
• Prior research on user innovation has paid a lot of attention to the commercial role of for-profit firms and the benefits for them. It has also largely focused on the actions of consumers involved with certain types of products (e.g., sports products, fashion apparel and consumers electronics). Consequently, we know less about user innovation activity in setting such as social innovation, green innovation, services and not for profit settings.
• Intellectual property (IP) is central to many forms of innovation. How does IP promote or inhibit user innovation? How does IP benefit or disadvantage those involved in user innovation?

Submission guidelines and important dates:

Papers should contain original research contributions that demonstrate the rigor emphasized in the editorial statement of the Journal of Engineering and Technology Management (JET-M). We welcome contributions from various disciplines, including engineering, science and management, and different types of papers, including empirical and conceptual. All manuscripts should conform to JET-M guidelines for authors; see:www.elsevier.com/locate/jengtecman.

The review process will follow the standard process of JET-M, but will be managed by the Guest Editors. Submissions are due by 1st February 2014. Please submit your article via:

After the first round of reviews, authors of manuscripts that receive an invitation to revise and resubmit will be invited to attend a Special Issue Conference. The conference will take place either in Denmark or Vancouver on the 29th and 30th April 2014 and will be sponsored by the CMA Innovation Centre. At this conference, authors will receive developmental feedback from the Guest Editors and invited discussants.

Further Information:

For questions regarding the content of this special issue, please contact the guest editors:
Marcel Bogers: bogers@mci.sdu.dk
Ian P. McCarthy: ian_mccarthy@sfu.ca
Leyland Pitt: lpitt@sfu.ca

References:

Berthon, P.R., Pitt, L.F., McCarthy, I. and Kates, S.M., 2007. When customers get clever: Managerial approaches to dealing with creative consumers. Business Horizons, 50 (1): 39-47.

Bogers, M., Afuah, A. and Bastian, B., 2010. Users as innovators: A review, critique, and future research directions. Journal of Management, 36 (4): 857-875.

Chesbrough, H. 2003., Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

Chesbrough, H., Vanhaverbeke, W. and West, J., (Eds.). 2006. Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Gales, L., and Mansour-Cole, D., 1995. User involvement in innovation projects: Toward an information processing model. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 12(1): 77-109.

Horwitch, M. and Stohr, E. A., 2012. Transforming technology management education: Value creation-learning in the early twenty-first century. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 29 (4): 489-507.

Kietzmann, J.H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I.P. and Silvestre, B.S., 2011. Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, 54 (3): 241-251.

Lettl, C., 2007. User involvement competence for radical innovation. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, 24(1): 53-75.

Poetz, M.K. and Schreier, M., 2012. The value of crowdsourcing: Can users really compete with professionals in generating new product ideas? Journal of Product Innovation Management, 29 (2): 245-256.

von Hippel, E., 1976. The dominant role of users in the scientific instrument innovation process. Research Policy, 5 (3): 212-239.

von Hippel, E., de Jong, J.P.J. and Flowers, S., 2012. Comparing business and household sector innovation in consumer products: Findings from a representative study in the United Kingdom. Management Science, 58 (9): 1669-1681.

West, J. and Bogers, M., forthcoming. Leveraging external sources of innovation: A review of research on open innovation. Journal of Product Innovation Management: =2195675

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