Designing the Organization for User Innovation

Abstract

There is increasing consensus among practitioners and academics alike that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift from producer-centered and internal innovation processes toward user-centered and open innovation processes. This paradigm shift induces significant changes to the design of organizations. Even though the research field of user innovation has been developing over a period of more than four decades, there have been only occasional intersections with the research field of organizational design. In this paper we aim to provide an integrated perspective of the two fields. We first identify major user innovation strategies. We then derive the implications of each user innovation strategy on key dimensions of organizational design. We conclude with an outlook on symbiotic producer-user ecosystems and the corresponding implications for organizational design.