دانلود رایگان مقاله اعمال نفوذ کاربران به عنوان نوآوران: مدیریت پتانسیل خلاق مصرف کنندگان فردی

Traditionally, firms have produced goods and services, and customers have consumed or used them. For firms, success came through understanding the needs of their customers well, and then producing and delivering offerings that would satisfy these needs. Or, it came through developing products that customers didn’t know they needed, but which then became a quintessential part of customers’ lives, shaping them in unanticipated ways. The role of customers was essentially passive: they consumed and used offerings for the purposes for which they were intended and seldom altered or modified them in any way. Automobiles were used for traveling from one place to another and baking soda was used for baking cakes, just as the manufacturers of these products had intended. Firms invented and produced, and modified when necessary; consumers only used and consumed. In the recent past however, scholars have observed customers not only using and consuming, but also repurposing, adapting, modifying, hacking and in other ways changing the proprietary offerings of firms. This phenomenon is known as user innovation (von Hippel, 1988, 2005; von Hippel et al., 2012) and includes intermediate users (e.g., user firms) and final consumer users (e.g., individual people and groups of people) (Bogers et al., 2010). This special issue focuses on consumer users. Classic examples of user innovation by consumers, includes innovations in skateboarding, windsurfing, and snowboarding products, in which the proprietary offerings of firms are modified and improved upon by consumers, who then freely share these innovations with other consumers (Shah, 2000; von Hippel, 2001). Morrison et al. (2000) outline the factors that determine these user innovations and how these creations are shared in local markets, and von Hippel (2001) has explored user creativity in one of the first arenas to embrace user driven innovation: open source software. Berthon et al. (2007) focus on ‘creative consumers’, those who start with an existing product and change it, as opposed to innovating completely new products ‘from scratch’. They describe a wide range of actions by creative consumers in a diverse set of products (e.g., automobiles, toys and computers) and services (e.g., userdesigned and coordinated tours of theme parks and repurposing of delivery service packaging). A number of inter-related developments and forces have accelerated the phenomenon of consumers as user innovators. First, many of the offerings used by consumers today are far more modular, rather than intact, in nature. These modular products embody high levels of reconfigurability and tend to be inexpensive, and this enables enthusiasts to tinker with technologies. For example, a consumer can buy a desktop computer from one supplier, a keyboard and mouse from another, and a monitor from yet another and combine them to satisfy the need for a desktop solution. The same consumer can then order and install additional inexpensive chips to make the computer more powerful, and additional storage media to enhance its memory. When offerings are modular, the potential is there for them to be combined and redeployed in innovative and initially unintended ways.