Sophie Quach's work strives to advance our understanding of how users and firms can both benefit from their complementary objectives, roles and resources in joint innovation processes. For firms, adopting, perfecting, producing, and eventually broadly diffusing commercially viable freely revealed user innovations among customers is clearly a great business opportunity. As user innovations originate from different incentives and in different environments than producer innovations, user innovations “generally pioneer functionally new applications and markets prior to producers understanding the opportunity” (von Hippel, 2017). Firms’ commercialization of user innovations is also beneficial from a societal perspective, as it reduces what has been termed the “diffusion shortfall” of user innovations (de Jong et al., 2015, 2018). Many valuable user innovations remain underused because users lack both incentives and resources to produce and popularize them.
Contact person: Svenja Friess