Abstract
All innovations consist of a need paired with a responsive solution - a need-solution pair (von Hippel and von Krogh 2016). Today, technical advances in machine learning techniques for natural language understanding, such as semantic word space models and semantic network analytics, have made it practical to capture descriptions of early-stage, need-solution pairs mentioned anywhere in the open, textual content of the Internet. Producers - and anyone - can now thus look for user innovations posted on the web that may involve either known or newly defined needs coupled to new solutions that are gaining traction. This is important because, as is now understood, users, rather than producers, tend to pioneer functionally new products and services for which both the need and the solution may be novel. In this paper, we demonstrate via a case study both the practicality and the value of searching for early-stage need-solution pairs via machine learning methods and assessing the likely general interest in each usergenerated innovation by also identifying the trends in posting and query frequencies related to it. The new need-solution pair search method we describe and test here can, we claim, serve as a very valuable complement to traditional market research techniques and practices.
Highlights
Introduction and overviewAll innovations consist of a need paired with a responsive solution – a need-solution pair
If producers or peer household sector users can find the pioneering innovations, they will generally be free to make use of what they learn. This leads us to the central question we address in this article: How in practice can one find pioneering user innovations that have been developed in the household sector? In early days of innovation devel opment and testing, when producers and user peers ideally would like to learn of them, we think that a promising source for information on consumer innovations is user-generated content posted on the web
We would like to point out to fellow experimenters that the regulatory environment is rapidly evolving in many nations and political entities with respect to protecting personal data privacy, and with respect to whether and how those data may be used by companies for commercial purposes (e.g. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Personal Data Protection Act 2012 (PDPA))
Summary
All innovations consist of a need paired with a responsive solution – a need-solution pair (von Hippel and von Krogh 2016). The approach is, as we will show, capable of screening the entire web for open, user-generated textual content as a practical search method This method, for we think the first time, makes it practical to search for user-developed need-solution pairs at a very early stage in innovation development and diffusion, when innovation-related information is known only to very few.
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