Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation ed. by Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani (review)

User innovation has become an increasingly popular way of crossing the producer-consumer divide that has traditionally plagued so much of technology studies. Revolutionizing Innovationis a Festschriftto one of the fathers of this concept, Eric von Hippel, professor of technological innovation at MIT. Although part of an ever more cumbersome genre, this liber amicorumhas its strong points.

The celebratory anthology consists of altogether twenty-five chapters divided in six parts ranging from the fundamentals of user innovation to legal aspects and interaction with manufacturers to toolkits and crowd funding for innovation. The analyses depart from a rather broad definition of user innovation as a novelty developed by end users (p. 67). Thus, manufacturing companies may well be the source of user innovations of, for instance, machinery, as may employees and management at an enterprise as long as they are end users of the products they are involved in producing. Needless to say, with such a broad perspective on user innovation, the different chapters cover a vast and varied stakeout.

Common to many of the chapters is the notion that user innovation is getting more and more frequent and thus more and more important, to a large extent as a consequence of digital technologies facilitating the forming of user communities for everything from drugs to diapers. Both are mentioned in the volume. It is no coincidence that the user-innovation example par excellence is open source software in all its different forms. Repeatedly, Linux, Apache, and similar systems are referred to in this anthology. Only a few chapters leaning on historical cases, most notably a contribution on historical knowledge sharing among inventors (pp. 135–55), balance this recurring fascination for the present.

An interesting tension between different chapters is visible in the implicit descriptions of the user innovators. Quite a few of the analyses depart from the perspective of user innovators as homines oeconomici—actors rationally maximizing their own wealth—while fewer stress that users' rewards for innovation are strongly related to their personal needs rather than profit, be it a mountain bike better suited for steep gravel roads or recognition in the community of alternative sailing. This ambivalence is to a large extent the result of the wide-ranging ambitions of the anthology to address everything from how user innovators may broadly benefit from their own innovations to models of when innovations may be commercially profitable for users or manufacturers. It is quite clear that most of the chapters lean toward the latter set of problems.

An indicative example is a chapter presenting a model on when user innovators start firms (pp. 285–307). Without risking too much oversimplification, the essence of the model is that users enter markets as producers when their profitability estimates are high enough while those of manufacturers are not. In the case of high enough profitability estimates for both manufacturers and users, either or both may pursue manufacturing or the user may license innovation to the manufacturer. The model is im-plicitly mirrored in another chapter describing two different strategies of user innovators becoming manufacturers using game theory (pp. 379–95). My point is not that the perspective of homo oeconomicusis a misrepresentation of human motives but that it would have been interesting if the ambivalence as to how to characterize user innovators had been explicitly discussed somewhere in the volume. This is especially the case here, since the tension between innovation for personal or ideological reasons and innovation for profit is essential for many user innovators themselves.

Revolutionizing Innovationcontains a number of interesting analyses and case studies of user innovation. Especially intriguing are studies of how suppliers may acquire needed information from customers by supplying them with tools to innovate, potentially recording and exploiting the results (pp. 459–81) or how manufacturers may satisfy demand for user innovation by supplying mass toolkits for customers to individualize the products (pp. 483–509 and 511...