دانلود رایگان مقاله شکست بازار در انتشار نوآوری های توسعه یافته توسط مصرف کننده: الگوها در فنلاند

abstract

Empirical studies have shown that millions of individual users develop new products and services to serve their own needs. The economic impact of this phenomenon increases if and as adopters in addition to the initial innovators also gain benefits from those user-developed innovations. It has been argued that the diffusion of user-developed innovations is negatively affected by a new type of market failure: value that others may gain from a user-developed product can often be an externality to consumerdevelopers. As a result, consumer innovators may not invest in supporting diffusion to the extent that would be socially optimal. In this paper, we utilize a broad sample of consumers in Finland to explore the extent to which innovations developed by individual users are deemed of potential value to others, and the extent to which they diffuse as a function of perceived general value. Our empirical analysis supports the hypothesis that a marketfailure is affecting the diffusion of user innovations developed by consumers for their own use. Implications and possible remedies are discussed.

5. Discussion

In this study, we have extensively analyzed the relationship between the perceived general value of user innovations,the extent to which they diffuse, and the extent to which effort is exerted by user innovators to support diffusion. Our goal has been to investigate the merit of the “under-diffusion of user innovation due to market failure” hypothesis (von Hippel et al., 2014), and to explore factors affecting it. Our analyses were based on a broad sample of consumers in Finland. In the remainder ofthis section, we discuss the evidence in favor of the under-diffusion of consumer innovation hypothesis. Then, we discuss the limitations of our study and offer suggestions for further research. Finally, we consider whether anything can be done to increase diffusion of generally valuable innovations that consumers develop.