User Innovation

This book systematically identifies the most important barriers to user-innovation and critically evaluates the democratization of innovation argument by critically assessing the main legal, economic, technological, and societal barriers to user-innovation for the first time and proposing alternative possibilities.

There has been a dramatic shift towards more open forms of innovation. Drawing on practice-based insights, together with theoretical approaches developed in innovation studies & science & technology studies, this book brings together a collection of recent work that examines key aspects of this model of innovation.

Thorsten Pieper explores the impact of innovation barriers along the user innovation process, in particular whether technological, social, legal and ownership barriers change the properties of user-developed products. This study roots from the “open innovation” research field and reveals insights from innovating users in “collaborative workspaces”. The results prove a hierarchical allocation of innovation barriers regarding their influence on the end-product and moderating influences of user innovators’ personal characteristics. The author discusses these insights and provides practical recommendations for more efficient promotion of user innovations and successful integration in corporate "co-creation" projects.

This book explores in depth the phenomenon of user innovation in healthcare. In particular, the book sheds light on patient innovation, whereby patients and/or caregivers proactively develop and diffuse new products and services that provide health and quality of life benefits by addressing gaps in existing market offerings. The aim is to clarify the key characteristics of these innovative processes and to offer practitioners and policymakers tangible bottom-up evidence, solutions, and ideas that will assist in improving health systems, organizations, and practices. A number of important and interesting research questions are addressed, casting light on the types of products and services that tend to be developed by patient innovators, the typical profile of these innovators, the role played by firms, institutions, and health professionals, and the ways in which digital technologies support the dissemination of innovations among patient communities and within the industry. Beyond academic scholars and policymakers, the book will be of high value for students on master’s programs in both medical sciences and business and economics.

The process of user-centered innovation: how it can benefit both users and manufacturers and how its emergence will bring changes in business models and in public policy. Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive. Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.

User Experience Innovation is a book about creating novel and engaging user experiences for new products and systems. User experience is what makes devices such as Apple's iPhone and systems such as Amazon.com so successful. iPhone customers don't buy just a phone; they buy into an experience enabled by the device. Similarly, Amazon.com customers enter a world of book reviews, interesting recommendations, instant downloads to their Kindle, and one-click purchasing. Products today are focal points, and it is the experience surrounding the product that matters the most. User Experience Innovation helps you create the right sort of experience around your products in order to be successful in the marketplace. The approach in User Experience Innovation is backed by 18 years of experience from an author holding more than 100 patents relating to user experience. This is a book written by a practitioner for other practitioners. You'll learn 17 specific methods for creating innovation; these methods run the gamut from targeting user needs to relieving pain points, to providing positive surprises, to innovating around paradoxes. Each method is one that the author has used successfully. Taken together, they can help you create truly successful user experience innovations to benefit your company or organization, and to help you grow as an experienced expert and innovator in your own right. Provides 17 proven methods for innovating around user experience Helps you think beyond the product to the sum total of a customer's experience Written by an experienced practitioner holding more than 100 user-experience patents

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Sustainable Business Models" that was published in Sustainability

How do development and use of new technology relate? How can users contribute to innovation? This volume is the first to study these questions by following particular technologies over several product launches in detail. It examines the emergence of inventive ideas about future technology and uses, how these are developed into products and embedded in health care practices, and how the form and impact of these technologies then evolves through several rounds of design and deployment across different types of organizations. Examining these processes through three case studies of health care innovations, these studies reveal a blind spot in extant research on development-use relations. The majority of studies have examined shorter ‘episodes’: moments within particular design projects, implementation processes, usability evaluations, and human-machine interactions. Studies with longer time-frames have resorted to a relatively coarse ‘grain-size’ of analysis and hence lost sight of how the interchange is actually done. As a result there are no social science, information systems, or management texts which comprehensively or adequately address: • how different moments, sites and modes of shaping new technology determine the evolution of new technology; • the detailed mechanisms of learning, interaction, and domination between different actors and technology during these drawn out processes; and • the relationship of technology projects and the professional practices and social imaginations that are associated in technology development, evaluation, and usage. The "biographies of technologies and practices" approach to new technology advanced in this volume offers us urgent new insight to core empirical and theoretical questions about how and where development projects gain their representations of future use and users, how usage is actually designed, how users’ requests and modifications affect designs, and what kind of learning takes place between developers and users in different phases of innovation—all crucial to our understanding and ability to advance new health technology, and innovation more generally.