Abstract
DIY laboratories have the potential to advance new technologies, products and services through the leveraging of low-cost facilities by entrepreneurial individuals. We add to this emerging understanding of the DIY phenomenon by investigating the prevalence, operations and contextual factors that impact the use of DIY laboratories in the bicycle industry. We find two contexts in which DIY laboratories are utilised to develop component-level innovations: first, DIY laboratories are utilised as a low-cost way to enter an industry where the entrepreneur lacks the necessary financial resources and rely upon bootstrapping to build their enterprise. Second, and more frequently, DIY laboratories were used for the integration of diversified technical knowledge originating in other industries. Our study highlights the important role that DIY laboratories may play in leveraging inter-industry knowledge spillovers whereby DIY laboratories operate as incubators in the repurposing of diversified knowledge from high-technology sectors to lower-technology sectors to generate incremental innovation. Further, the modular product architecture of the bicycle helped facilitate the co-opting of technical knowledge prevalent in other industries by allowing entrepreneurs to focus their product development and subsequent commercialisation activities at the component level of the product artefact.
Highlights
Technological innovation has long been linked to firm performance and economic growth (Andersson et al, 2018; Klarin, 2019; Li et al, 2020; Tian et al, 2018)
Our analysis seeks to illuminate the inter-industry knowledge spillover role that DIY labs play in repurposing knowledge from high-technology sectors and driving forward innovation in a re cipient sector. As part of this investigation, we considered the outputs of these DIY labs in terms of the types of innovations generated and the role of technological and contextual factors in allowing DIY labs to provide an effective entry point for new entrants to deliver exaptive innovations into the bicycle industry
Our findings have highlighted that the bicycle industry has bene fitted from numerous innovations across virtually all components in the product architecture, and DIY labs played an important, but albeit limited, role in this technological advancement as these innovations often drew upon technical knowledge that originated in other ‘super spreader’ sectors
Summary
Technological innovation has long been linked to firm performance and economic growth (Andersson et al, 2018; Klarin, 2019; Li et al, 2020; Tian et al, 2018) How this innovation occurs has been the subject of different models such as technology-push versus market-pull (Arthur, 2009) along with considerable analysis of the processes and the actors involved leading to different foci over time ranging from alliances and inter-organisational networks to open innovation, and the study of institutional factors (Christofi et al, 2019; Nylund et al, 2020; Rice et al, 2012). As part of this investigation, we considered the outputs of these DIY labs in terms of the types of innovations generated and the role of technological and contextual factors (e.g., product architecture) in allowing DIY labs to provide an effective entry point for new entrants to deliver exaptive innovations into the bicycle industry
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