Chapter 8

Summary

Chapter 8 addresses the need for both user and manufacturer innovation to work synergistically in order to have optimal products out on the market. Manufacturers, in general, have a poor sense of what the users want because they operate at a level so detached from the common user – in order to complement their lack of aptitude in the area, it’s imperative for the manufacturers to get closer to the user innovations.

The amount of user innovations on the market could also lead to a problem of over and underprovisioning. The term overprovisioning implies that if there are too many items on a market, thereby increasing the level of diversity on the market, the amount of manufacturing on the market goes down. The trade off can be seen as: variety products on the market vs quantity of products on the market.

Intellectual property is another debate: because grants and patents are costly and time consuming to get, most innovators don’t stop to think about getting a patent for every innovation they create, because most innovations are minor. The amount of minor contributions, as we learned in previous chapters, is what fuels the greater innovations to come. One example is open source software, namely Linux. By nature, Linux is open source, meaning anyone can make any change on the software, regardless of its impact. Because by nature, most tweaks and changes are minor in nature, the changes accumulate into one large, innovative piece of software.

What does this have to do with intellectual property? It shows that, regardless of the lure of being able to control your innovations, innovators have their own private rewards which outweighs the benefits of having private intellectual property.