Quotes About Users

I have always believed that technology should do the hard work - discovery, organization, communication - so users can do what makes them happiest: living and loving, not messing with annoying computers! That means making our products work together seamlessly.

We want to strike the right balance between the governments and our users. If there are concerns, we can work together.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.

Going to a site with more users seems obviously better to me, but at the same time, having a bland, middle of the road profile with bland, middle of the road pictures seems like a bad strategy to me.

Internet users, that blue screen of death you were looking at this morning? That's the sky. If you're still confused, look it up on Wikipedia tomorrow.

changing an institution's environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness.

Users are wonderful things to have, and not just because they demonstrate that you're serving a need, that you've done something right. Properly cultivated, they can become co-developers.

Part of the answer certainly lies in the fact that using software does not decrease its value. Indeed, widespread use of open-source software tends to increase its value, as users fold in their own fixes and features (code patches). In this inverse commons, the grass grows taller when it's grazed upon.

Innovation by users tends to be widely distributed rather than concentrated among just a very few very innovative users. As a result, it is important for user-innovators to find ways to combine and leverage their efforts. Users

1 Introduction and Overview When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services-both firms and individual consumers-are increasingly

begin this chapter by reviewing the evidence that many users indeed do develop and modify products for their own use in many fields. I then show that innovation is concentrated among lead users, and that lead users' innovations often become commercial products.

this chapter by reviewing the evidence that many users indeed do develop and modify products for their own use

When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services-both firms and individual consumers-are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation

than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not

say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services-both firms and individual consumers-are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation

When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services-both firms and individual consumers-are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want

Users and manufacturers can apply the insights developed in this book to improve their innovation processes. In this chapter, I illustrate by showing how firms can profit by systematically searching for innovations developed

Empirical studies show that many users—from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent—engage in developing or modifying products. About half of these studies do not determine representative innovation frequencies; they were designed for other purposes. Nonetheless, when taken together, the findings make it very clear that users are doing a lot of product modification and product development in many fields.

When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services-both firms and individual consumers-are increasingly

Studies of innovating users (both individuals and firms) show them to have the characteristics of "lead users." That is, they are ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend, and they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there. The correlations found between innovation by users and lead user status are highly significant, and the effects are very large.

likelihood of innovating is higher for users having higher lead user index values. The rise in average innovation attractiveness as one moves from left to right indicates that innovations developed by lead users tend to be more commercially attractive. (Innovation attractiveness is the sum of the novelty of the innovation and the expected future generality of market demand.)

had a very high heterogeneity of need, and that many had a high willingness to pay to get precisely what they wanted. Nineteen percent of the users sampled actually innovated to tailor Apache more closely to their needs. Those who did

appeal in the general marketplace. Estimated OLS function: Y = 2.06 + 0.57x, where Y represents attractiveness of innovation and x represents lead-user-ness of respondent. Adjusted R2 = 0.281; p = 0.002; n = 30. Source of data: Franke and von Hippel 2003. Why Many Users Want

The empirical finding that users often freely reveal their innovations has been a major surprise to innovation researchers.