User Innovation in the Automobile Sector

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Source

Mentioned by Sonali Shah, in her essay, Open Beyond Software, in the book Open Sources 2.0

URL = http://faculty.washington.edu/skshah/Shah%20-%20Open%20Beyond%20Software.pdf


Examples

Sonali Shah:

"Franz (1999) describes innovations in automotive accessories made by middle-class American leisure travelers during the early 1900s. She reports that users built and added such features as radiator hoods, safety devices, interior heaters, automobile tops, trunks, reclining seats, and electric ignitions to their cars. Some even replaced the standard body altogether. “The rewards of tinkering lay… in the cultural space of leisure where amateurs produced their own narratives of ingenuity and claimed knowledge of the new machine (Franz 1999, pg. 149).”

Many of these innovators shouldered the cost of disseminating news of their innovations to other automobile enthusiasts. In the early 1900s a high number of journals for automobile enthusiasts - “written by and for devotees of the new “sport” (Franz 1999, pg. 198)” - published innovator-written “how-to” articles. Existing manufacturers often learned of innovations via the innovators themselves, through requests for repairs, phone calls suggesting that the manufacturer adopt the innovations, and articles in the hobbyist journals (one of the journals was sponsored by Ford). Despite these avenues for information transfer and the fact that many innovating users did not patent their innovations, substantial time lags existed between the time an innovation was made and communicated to other users and when manufacturers incorporated it into commercial products." (http://faculty.washington.edu/skshah/Shah%20-%20Open%20Beyond%20Software.pdf)


More Information

  1. User Innovation in Sports
  2. Franz, K. (1999). Narrating Automobility: Travelers, Tinkerers, and Technological Authority in

the Twentieth Century (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation). Providence, Rhode Island, Brown University.