User Conditions For Innovation And Paradigm

In the knowledge economy, the innovation ability is playing a more and more important role in the overall competitiveness of an enterprise. However, as market competition intensifies, environment complicates and consumer demands diversify, the innovation is faced with unprecedented difficulties. With the advent of experience economy, a customer is no longer only a passive receiver of product and sevice but a collaberator of manufactors. More and more researches imply that the phenomenon of user innovation is becoming increasingly common, which arouses tremendous interest among researchers. It is a hot topic that how an enterprise can exploit and make full use of user innovation so as to reduce its innovation risk. Researchers found that user innovation plays an inceasingly important role in the innovation syetem of enterprises. Under such conditions, it is of great use to study user innovations.Based on previous traditional technological innvation theories, this paper starts with User Innovation phenomenon, reviews previous literature, comes up with the definition, characteristics, types of User Innovation, and sum up other research achievements of User Innovation. Then a statistic model of driving forces and types of User Innovations is brought forward. This model is improved by the results of field studies. A questionnaire-based survey is carried out among innovating users of several fields and SPSS 13.0 is applied to data analysis.According to the result of investigation and data analysis, several important conclusions are drawn and the model and hypotheses are adjusted. They are as follows:(1) Several factors that affect the innovating activities of users are innovation desire, innovation capability, agency cost, enterprise support, complexity of innovation project, information stickiness. Through correlation analyses and regression analyses, we found that these six factors have a deep influence on users' involvement in the four phases of product innovation, which are defined as idea generation, product design, product development and product testing.(2) Through clustering analyses, I found that there're 3 styles of user innovation, categorized by the extent to which the user is invovled in the whole process of innovation. They're User self-innovation, User-centered innovation, and User co-operation.(3) Through discriminant analyses, I found that 5 factors, including innovation desire, innovation capability, agency cost, enterprise support and complexity of innovation project, differentiate greatly among three different innovation styles. Consequently, I concluded that different factors would lead to different innovation styles.Based on the theoretical research conclusions, in combination with concrete circumstance of innovating users, advices for users, enterprises and government are represented. The research prospects are depicted at the end of the paper.