Eric Von Hippel started talking about lead-user innovation as early as in the mid-eighties. Sonn after, consumer participation in service delivery and product development started to gain momentum in the nineties, and the first articles about co-creation were published in 2000. Even though these trends are obvious today, few hard facts have been published about consumer vs. business innovation. This post discusses the results of two quite recent surveys, the first ones to analyse this phenomenon on a large scale. Comparing Business And Household Innovation in Consumer Products (UK) shows that “consumer innovation is not a niche phenomenon“, and the Business R&D and Innovation Survey (US) indicates that “92% of US businesses reported NOT developing a new product/service between 06 and 08“, which is extremely low.
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