Sampsa Hyysalo

Intermediaries, Users and Social Learning in Technological Innovation

This paper explores the role of intermediaries in the development and appropriation of new technologies. We focus on intermediaries that facilitate user innovation, and the linking of user innovation into supply side activities. We review findings on intermediaries in some of our studies and other available literature to build a framework to explore of how intermediaries work in making innovation happen. We make sense of these processes by taking a long-term view of the dynamics of technology and market development using the social learning in technological innovation (SLTI) framework. Our primary concern is with innovation intermediaries and their core roles of configuring, facilitating and brokering technologies, uses and relationships in uncertain and emerging markets. We show the range of positions and influence they have along the supply-use axis in a number of different innovation contexts, and how they are able to bridge the user-developer innovation domains. Equipped with these insights, we explore in more depth how intermediaries affect the shape of new information and communication technologies and the importance of identifying and nurturing the user-side intermediaries that are crucial to innovation success.

User innovation and everyday practices: micro-innovation in sports industry development

This paper focuses on an underemphasized issue in research on user innovation, namely users adaptations and micro-innovations and their impact on industry development in user-innovation-intensive industries. It complements previous analyses of rodeo and freestyle-kayaking that explore the role of user innovators in industry development, by focusing on different aspects of micro-innovation: (1) changes in the composition of user base and preferred equipment (2) evolution of everyday practice (3) changes in the settings of these practices and (4) the range of modes of user involvement. Through micro-innovation, users, on the whole, are likely to have more impact on industry development than predicted, and yet the position of lead-users and user–manufacturers may be less powerful relative to outside manufacturers.

Constructing innovative users and user-inclusive innovation communities

This paper reconceptualises the topical issue of user involvement in innovation. We argue that there is more to user involvement than the mechanistic application of methods and tools. Drawing on four case studies, we explore the range of configurations that user-inclusive innovation communities can encompass. We show that user involvement is not a panacea for innovation, and that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ method. Nor is the ability to contribute to innovation an inherent quality of the users themselves. It is constituted by the actions of the producer company in fostering interaction and in responding to users’ initiatives. Companies interested in user-inclusive innovation are recommended to closely consider how knowledge sharing between users and producers evolves, what artefacts can serve as mediating representations, and what challenges there are to aligning divergent interests.