Beyond the Obvious: Understanding and Integrating Producer-led and User-led Innovation Paradigms from New Perspectives

Innovation is key to ensuring sustained performance, generating economic growth, and driving progress – not only for individual organizations but also for societies as a whole. Yet, globalization, rapid technological change, and advances in information and communication technologies have turned innovation from an exclusive province of producers into a multilayered sphere that equally encompasses established manufacturing firms and entrepreneurs, as well as open collaboration communities and innovating end users. Hence, the traditional producer-led innovation paradigm is increasingly complemented and contested by a user-led counterpart. To understand the intricacies of this paradigm shift and successfully manage innovation efforts, both, from an organizational and a national level, management and policy makers are in dire need of new perspectives and differentiated insights into the two innovation paradigms, and especially their key drivers. Scientific research has greatly contributed to this quest by extensive investigations of internal and external drivers of organizational innovation, as well as person-related drivers of user innovation. But findings of central drivers are inconclusive and key areas for drivers, for example user innovators’ work environment, remain largely unexplored. Building on the conceptual distinction between producer-led and user-led innovation that frames today’s scientific and managerial discourse, this thesis is dedicated to the identification of central innovation drivers and the investigation of potentially arising interactions between the two paradigms. Specifically, to follow up on research gaps and provide new insights, organizational-level and individual-level resource-based theories are employed and two empirical studies on selected drivers of producer- and user-led innovation are conducted. Both studies extend traditional views on innovation in the two innovation paradigms and advance research by introducing new perspectives that explore beyond the obvious. First, study 1 investigates leadership as a key driver of innovation in the producer-led innovation paradigm by adopting a cross-dimensional perspective that combines innovation and efficiency performance dimensions. The study theoretically introduces and empirically analyzes newly developed scales of dual innovation leadership, a new leadership approach tailored to the unique requirements of the innovation process. Results of structural equation modeling with data from 194 executives of organizational units collected at two points in time empirically substantiate evidence that dual innovation leaders ensure sustainable organizational performance, and hence advance producer-led innovation. With regard to the user-led innovation paradigm, study 2 identifies user innovators’ work environment as a key driver of innovation and adopts a cross-domain perspective that bridges user innovators’ home and work sphere. Specifically, study 2 advances research by investigating a largely unexplored area and corroborating the notion of resource spillovers between different domains. Based on data of 147 work-inspired consumer innovators and three independent raters, results of structural equation modeling show that consumer innovators build job-related resources from their work environment that enhance the outcome of their household sector innovation efforts in terms of novelty, general use value, and technical feasibility. Second, innovation is a resource-intense undertaking and resources are increasingly in short supply. Thus, resource-protecting and mutually beneficial interactions may offer a sustainable approach to manage innovation in the new era of ‘dual paradigms’. Combining insights from study 1 and study 2, the thesis therefore illuminates the potential for interactions between the producer and user innovation sphere by elaborating how producer innovators may indirectly support user innovators. Moreover, the thesis exemplarily illustrates how (dual innovation) leadership targeted to producer-led innovation can foster cross-fertilization between the two paradigms by equally enhancing user-led innovation. To this end, an integrative perspective on the two paradigms is introduced. With these comprehensive, yet differentiated insights on key drivers and their interactions in producer- and user-led innovation, the thesis extends the scientific state of knowledge and suggests important implications for future research. Moreover, the thesis provides management and policy makers with a valuable guiding framework that may support innovation initiatives targeted to the successful realization of innovation endeavors and, hence, the fostering of economic, as well as societal progress.