User innovation and everyday practices: micro‐innovation in sports industry development

Abstract

This paper focuses on an underemphasized issue in research on user innovation, namely users' adaptations and micro‐innovations and their impact on industry development in user‐innovation‐intensive industries. It complements previous analyses of rodeo and freestyle‐kayaking that explore the role of user innovators in industry development, by focusing on different aspects of micro‐innovation: (1) changes in the composition of user base and preferred equipment (2) evolution of everyday practice (3) changes in the settings of these practices and (4) the range of modes of user involvement. Through micro‐innovation, users, on the whole, are likely to have more impact on industry development than predicted, and yet the position of lead‐users and user–manufacturers may be less powerful relative to outside manufacturers.