Acknowledgements:We would like to express our appreciation to Susan Schaan of Statistics Canada for her help with the 2007 survey we report upon here. Also we thank Mark Uhrback and Jeroen de Jong for their contribution to the development of the survey questions, and thank Statistics Canada colleagues for the testing of the resulting questionnaires. Finally, we thank Joachim Henkel for his careful and critical reading of the final manuscript. Responses to the survey showed that data on both user innovation and the transfers of these innovations could be reliably collected, and that novel findings important to policymaking would result. One such finding: About 20% of the user-innovators surveyed reported transferring their innovations to other users and/or equipment suppliers -and the majority of these at least sometimes did so at no charge to recipients. Since cost-free sharing of innovations is understood to result in greater social welfare than licensing for a fee, innovation rates being equal, this finding has important public policy implications. Current government innovation policies tend to favor and even to subsidize the obtaining of intellectual property rights as a means of encouraging innovation. If a significant fraction of user-innovators in the economy are already freely revealing their innovations -despite the availability of intellectual property grants -perhaps intellectual property rights policies should be reexamined.We propose that improved versions of the novel statistical indicators piloted here should be integrated into official statistics so that user innovation, and related matters such as voluntary spillovers of innovation-related information, can be better monitored, better understood, and better managed.
This paper proposes a way of including in official statistics consumers as user innovators who modify or develop products for their own use. The issue addressed is the role of the market in the definition of innovation in the OECD/Eurostat Oslo Manual and the exclusion by the definition of consumers who modify or develop products and then freely reveal the knowledge gained to others. A modest proposal is made for a change to the definition which also has implications for the measurement of innovation in the public sector. The policy implications of user innovation by consumers and by firms are considered along with the importance of including consumer user innovation in official statistics. The paper ends with a programme for future work.
JEL Codes H00, O33
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