The Rise of the User-Manufacturer
MaryAnne M. Gobble · Research-Technology Management · 2013
Thanks to Eric von Hippel, the existence of the user-innovator is widely acknowledged, if still not well understood by many firms. Still, some companies are engaging with user-innovators in productive ways. LEGO, whose engagement with its lead users is documented by Yun Mi Antorini and Albert Mufiiz in this issue, is a leading example in this area. The existence of firms like Quirky.com, which manufactures products proposed by members of its community, would seem to validate the value of the user-innovator. But the model of the user-innovator may already be outdated. The increasing pervasiveness of social networks, the rise of consumer-level manufacturing tools, and the rise of the open-source movement mean that companies must now cope with a new, more powerful iteration of the user-innovator: the user-manufacturer. Von Hippel's idea of the user-innovator more or less explicitly suggests that user-innovators are primarily engaged in is known in some circles as modding--modifying existing products to better satisfy their needs. (In a 2011 interview with Haydn Shaughnessy, he says that his landmark U.K. study asked people what products in the last three years have you modified to make them work better for you?) For firms the value of the user-innovator relies on two beliefs: that these product mods can provide ideas for future products and that users will eventually need a company to manufacture their ideas and distribute them on a wider scale. The experience of LEGO and others has proven the first proposition, although companies must figure out how to interact with users and resolve the challenges of integrating them into corporate innovation processes. Very soon, however, the second may no longer be true. Until quite recently, the ability of independent users to execute their ideas was quite limited. Product modifications were one-off affairs that might be copied or adapted by other users, but they couldn't be widely distributed in a finished form without the support of a manufacturer. This is where the opportunity lies for firms: user innovations can be accessed, polished and made manufacturable, and sold to more mainstream markets. As von Hippel describes in the Conversations interview in this issue, this model allows firms to essentially surrender RD later, he experimented with sensors and processors usually used in smartphones. That hobby grew first into an online community--DIYDrones--and then into a traditional manufacturing company. When Microsoft released its Kinect camera for the Xbox 360 in November 2010, it thought it was offering an add-on to its videogame system, an interface that allowed players to interact with the game by moving their bodies. …