and Carnegie Mellon University (PhD). His research examines the sources of and economics of innovation, with a particular focus on the significant role played by lead users in the innovation development process. He has written a book on this topic entitled the "Sources of Innovation." His most recent research explores how developers may best gain access to the "sticky" information that they need to create concepts for radically new products and services. He finds that, when users hold key sticky information, it often makes sense that they, rather than manufacturers, develop the innovations requiring that information. 3 User Toolkits for Innovation ABSTRACT Manufacturers must accurately understand user needs in order to develop successful products -but the task is becoming steadily more difficult as user needs change more rapidly, and as firms increasingly seek to serve "markets of one." User toolkits for innovation allow manufacturers to actually abandon their attempts to understand user needs in detail in favor of transferring need-related aspects of product and service development to users along with an appropriate toolkit. User toolkits for innovation are specific to given product or service type and to a specified production system. Within those general constraints, they give users real freedom to innovate, allowing them to develop their custom product via iterative trial-and-error. That is, users can create a preliminary design, simulate or prototype it, evaluate its functioning in their own use environment, and then iteratively improve it until satisfied. As the concept is evolving, toolkits guide the user to insure that the completed design can be produced on the intended production system without change. Pioneering applications in areas ranging from the development of custom integrated circuits to the development of custom foods show that user toolkits for innovation can be much more effective than traditional, manufacturer-based development methods. 4
Von Hippel described toolkits for user innovation as a way to transfer design abilities from the toolkit developer to the user REF .
User Toolkits for Innovation
Journal of Product Innovation Management
Business