Single vs. Collaborative Innovation

Recall from chapter 1 that innovators may develop their innovations either as single individuals or collaboratively with others. In the six surveys, most individuals reported having developed their most recent innovations alone, and 10-28 percent reported having innovated collaboratively (table 2.6). As I will discuss in chapter 3, this pattern makes good economic sense. Collaborative development can produce major cost savings for participants in larger projects, where substantial costs are being shared. For relatively small projects, however, such as the typical household sector projects documented here, it can be more efficient to innovate alone, and in that way avoid the costs of coordinating development work with others.

Table 2.6

Modes of innovation.

Is It Free Innovation?

Recall from chapter 1 that I defined free innovation as having two characteristics. First, no one pays free innovators for their development work, they do it during their unpaid, discretionary time. Second, free innovation designs are not actively protected by their developers—they are potentially acquirable by anyone for free. From the data in the six national surveys, we can directly conclude that more than 90 percent of the innovators surveyed fulfill these two criteria. With respect to the first, all six surveys asked respondents whether they had developed their innovations during their unpaid, discretionary time, and included data only from individuals who said this was the case. With respect to the second criterion, all six surveys provided a list of possible means of preventing free adoption, ranging from secrecy to patenting, and asked innovating respondents whether they had used any of these to protect their innovations. As can be seen in table 2.7, efforts to protect innovations by secrecy or intellectual property rights of any kind were quite rare.

Table 2.7

Household sector innovations protected by intellectual property rights.

Of course, a general absence of investment in protection could mean simply that efforts to protect were seen as impractically costly by household sector innovators (Baldwin 2008; Blaxill and Eckardt 2009; von Hippel 2005; Strandburg 2008). If that were the case, these innovators might wish they could protect their innovations, and would do so if a low-cost way (say, very inexpensive forms of patenting) were to become available. Such a situation would render free innovation a fragile phenomenon, at risk of vanishing if a cheaper way to protect innovations emerged.

To test this possibility, my colleagues and I asked participants in the Finland and Canadian national surveys about their willingness to reveal their innovations freely. In Finland, 84 percent said they were willing to freely reveal their innovations to at least some people. Of these, 44 percent were willing to reveal their innovations to anyone and everyone, and an additional 40 percent were willing to freely reveal their innovations selectively to friends and others in their personal networks (de Jong, von Hippel, Gault, Kuusisto, and Raasch 2015). In the Canadian study, de Jong (2013) found that overall willingness to freely reveal was also 88 percent, with 66 percent of respondents willing to freely reveal to everyone, and an additional 22 percent willing to freely reveal selectively to their networks. In both Finland and Canada, in other words, it appears that free revealing is not simply an artifact of high costs of protection—a large fraction of household sector innovators are willing to freely reveal their innovations to some or all.