Paper instructions:
Consumer users are important sources of marketplace innovation. Different types of individuals undertake user innovation to produce new products and services. The firm, its customers and suppliers may each play a role in concert with each other.
Your paper will focus on how firms may identify, evaluate, acquire and exploit the innovation-related knowledge of individual consumers. It will discuss the ways products may be categorized to understand their impact on user innovation opportunities and challenges that affect organizational learning opportunities. It will explore the motivations of user innovators as related to the type of innovation activity undertaken. The paper should also relate the role of consumers as innovative co-producers in the context of different industries and different cultures.
Some basic “starter” references are:
Lettl, C.: 2007. User involvement competence for radical innovation. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management. 24(1): 53-75.
Von Hippel, E., De Jong, J.P.J. and Flowers, S., 2012. Comparing business and household sector innovation in consumer products: Finding representative study in the UK, Management Science 58(9): 1669-1681.
Finally, and importantly, this project should be approached from the perspective of service-dominant logic (Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. 2007, J. of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36:1 1-10, and their other writings, including useful nuggests especially chapter 13 from their book: The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate and Directions (2006), Lusch, R. L. and Vargo, S. L. eds. Armonk, NY: F. E. Sharpe.)
Your paper should research and discuss service-dominant logic, and show explicitly how it has been applied in your paper.
