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In the traditional new product development process, manufacturers first explore user needs and then develop responsive products. Developing an accurate understanding of a user
need is not simple or fast or cheap, however. As a result, the traditional approach is coming under increasing strain as user needs change more rapidly, and as firms increasingly seek to serve "markets of one."
Toolkits for user innovation is an emerging alternative approach in which manufacturers actually abandon the attempt to understand user needs in detail in favor of transferring need-- related aspects of product and service development to users. Experience in fields where the toolkit approach has been pioneered show custom products being developed much more quickly and at a lower cost. In this paper we explore toolkits for user innovation and explain why and how they work.
(User Innovation; Toolkits; Mass Customization; Product Development)
1. Introduction
Research has consistently shown that new products and services must accurately respond to user needs if they are to succeed in the marketplace. However, it is often a very costly matter for firms to understand users' needs deeply and well. Need information is very complex, and conventional market research techniques only skim the surface. Techniques that probe more deeply, such as ethnographic studies, are both difficult and time consuming. Further, the task of understanding user needs is growing ever more difficult as firms increasingly strive to learn about and serve the unique needs of "markets of one," and as the pace of change in markets and user needs grows ever faster. Indeed, firms at the leading edge of these trends are finding that conventional solutions are breaking down completely, and that a whole new approach is needed if they are to be able to continue to produce products and services that accurately respond to their users' needs.
Fortunately, an entirely new approach to this problem is being developed in a few high-tech fields. In this emerging new approach, manufacturers actually abandon their increasingly frustrating efforts to understand users' needs accurately and in detail. Instead, they outsource key need-related innovation tasks to the users themselves after equipping them with appropriate "toolkits for user innovation."
Toolkits for user innovation are coordinated sets of "user-friendly" design tools that enable users to develop...