Identifying Consumer Innovators: A Five-Step Survey Procedure

Rather than businesses, individual end consumers may develop innovations for themselves. Typically such innovators are not bothered with protecting their innovation-related knowledge, a phenomenon recently coined as ‘free innovation’ (von Hippel, E. (in press), Free Innovation, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA). End consumers typically innovate for other reasons than commercial gains: personal use benefits, fun, learning, or helping others. This paper...