Abstract
In dynamic business environments entrepreneurs increasingly strive to customise new products/services to displayed and latent user needs. User-driven innovation (U.D.I.) aims to incorporate user needs by giving users an active role in the innovation process. Despite the growing interest of researchers in U.D.I., empirical evidence remains scarce, because of a lack of a psychometrically sound instrument to enhance insight into U.D.I. This paper derives an integrative definition of U.D.I. from different U.D.I. research streams and proposes a model with three distinctive dimensions of U.D.I.: user involvement, searching feedback and design orientation. Three consecutive studies result in a 13-item U.D.I. scale with appropriate reliability, dimensionality, convergent and discriminant validity. Pilot studies include researchers, entrepreneurs and practitioners. The main study comprises data of 357 S.M.E.s. The analyses confirm the multidimensionality of the proposed construct. This study contributes to existing research of U.D.I. in entrepreneurship by addressing the multidimensional nature of U.D.I. with a new research instrument. The proposed U.D.I. scale can be used in future investigations of U.D.I. The construct is informative also for practitioners in introducing U.D.I. to their companies.
Highlights
Entrepreneurs in dynamic business environments discover new business opportunities in customising products/services to user needs (Priem, Li, & Carr, 2012) and exploit the benefits of involving users into the innovation process (Smith & Shah, 2013)
This paper focuses on U.D.I. in new product/service development
To address the identified research gap, this study first aims to deliver a theoretically justified, reliable and valid measure of U.D.I. by reviewing the growing research in this interdisciplinary field, and considering the latest theoretical improvements of the concept. On this basis we propose an integrative definition of U.D.I., and posit U.D.I. as consisting of three distinctive components: user involvement in the innovation process, searching for feedback from users and a design orientation toward developing desirable user experiences
Summary
Entrepreneurs in dynamic business environments discover new business opportunities in customising products/services to user needs (Priem, Li, & Carr, 2012) and exploit the benefits of involving users into the innovation process (Smith & Shah, 2013). The U.D.I. brings to the surface a need for changes in thinking about approaches to value creation from a company-oriented view to a user-oriented view (Lockwood, 2009; Ottosson, 2004). ECONOMIC RESEARCH-EKONOMSKA ISTRAŽIVANJA 1473 in recent management and entrepreneurship research, some of which concerns new product/service development (Alam, 2002; Kaulio, 1998; Ottosson, 2004). Another approach studies user entrepreneurship and product/service commercialisation (Shah & Tripsas, 2007). This paper focuses on U.D.I. in new product/service development
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