Innovation as Consumption: Analysis of Consumers’ Innovation Efficiency

In this paper we report upon a first empirical exploration of the relative efficiency of innovation development by product users vs. product producers. In a study of over 50 years of product innovation in the whitewater kayaking field, we find users in aggregate were approximately 3X more efficient at developing important kayaking product innovations than were producers in aggregate. We speculate that this result is driven by what we term...