EAGER: Consumer Innovation Survey Development

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

Groundbreaking studies in countries outside the United States have observed that private individual residents invest substantial time and money creating innovative products and services for their own use, and sometimes for use by others. The results from these studies suggests that few individuals publicly diffuse their innovations, and fewer still apply for intellectual property protection. If this is true in the United States, then innovators, businesses, and the general public are not fully capitalizing on the creativity and ingenuity of American innovators. Unfortunately, no rigorous studies have undertaken the task of documenting the prevalence and dynamics of private innovation activities in the United States. As a result, we know little about the number of Americans creating innovative products and services, the number of innovations they create, their motivation for innovating, how much time and money they invest in innovation activities, and if they disseminate the results of their efforts. This project aims to fill this knowledge gap by: first, developing and validating a survey instrument to measure consumer innovation activities; and, second, administering the validated instrument to a random sample of the United States adult population in order to estimate population-level rates of consumer innovation. The results from this project will be useful to other researchers as it will create baseline estimates of consumer innovation activity against which future studies may be compared. The results may also influence the practice of consumer innovation. By identifying factors that impede private individuals from diffusing their innovations to others and from applying for intellectual property protection, this research can inform public policies that help individuals overcome these barriers. The primary objective of this project is to develop an instrument and methodology for accurately estimating the prevalence with which private individuals in the United States create or modify consumer products. Secondary objectives include developing better understandings of the motivations for consumer innovation, the personal resources expended in developing consumer innovations, and how (and how often) consumer innovators attempt to protect their innovations and/or share their innovations with others. Two data collections are planned. First, after refining a draft survey instrument through cognitive interviews with individuals who are pre-identified as likely innovators, the revised survey will be administered to another 500 pre-identified likely innovators. The data from this initial survey will be validated against known benchmarks, and open-ended items will be coded to ensure reliability. The second data collection will produce 3,000 completed questionnaires from a random sample of the U.S. adult population. By utilizing a sample of U.S. adults, rather than sampling from groups likely to include innovators, the results will enable the validation of the survey instrument as a tool for estimating population-level rates of innovation activity.