CGIP: MANAGING CONSUMER-GENERATED INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Creative consumers (defined as customers who adapt, modify, or transform a proprietary offering) represent an intriguing paradox for business. On one hand, they can signify a black hole for future revenue, with breach of copyright and intellectual property. On the other hand, they represent a gold mine of ideas and business opportunities. Central to business is the need to create and capture value, and creative consumers demand a shift in the mindsets and business models of how firms accomplish both. Based upon their attitude and action toward customer innovation, we develop a typology of firms’ stances toward creative consumers. We then consider the implications of the stances model for corporate strategy and examine a three-step approach to dealing with creative consumers: awareness, analysis, and response.

Advances in Economics and Business, 2017

The paper "Intellectual property rights and consumer behavior" is focused on IP rights for product innovations and business indicators of the company and their influence on the consumer behavior. The objective of this paper is to reveal the business offer as a complex of IP rights and as a factor of consumer behavior into 2 main aspects: 1. Product innovations with IP rights as a complex utility for consumer. 2. Business indicators with IP rights as an exclusive market proposition. This paper considers the matter of market characteristics of the business offer with implemented product innovations with IP rights for an invention, utility model and industrial design and the business indicators as trademarks, graphic designs, and domain names. The production and marketing of new products with obtained intellectual property rights the whole economic cycle goes through different phases: from a project of innovation to a market proposition with distinctive signs of IP protection. The implementation of IP into a business offer has the significant aim to achieve economic benefits from the implemented innovations and/or business indicators and to receive future revenues from the exclusive market proposition for the consumer. The final part of this paper is focused on the economic aspects of market characteristics of IP as a factor influencing the consumers and as a factor of the company competitiveness based on IP. To prove these conclusions in this paper are used examples of good practices of the successful companies, market studies and IP research.

2022

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) talk about the exclusive monopoly to the holder. Although IPRs may appear to be a part of the product development, but holistically, it is much more than just that. The regime of intellectual property also dictates the aftermath of the launch of the product. In fact, consumer products uniquely cross into all areas of intellectual property. While, the IPRs help the consumers in buying quality products, they also ensure protection from use of substandard products which may cause health and safety hazards. In this regard, one of the essentials of IPRs is also to protect consumers from deceit and confusion. In this perspective, the paper argues that even though the interplay of consumers and IPRs is not very apparent, yet protection against unfair competition, which is recognized as one of the main objectives of intellectual property system, demands greater attention. Here, the proper operation of IPRs and their enforcement plays significant role. The paper concludes that consumer being the nucleus, demands careful evaluation of IP policies, their management, and deployment of auxiliary strategies.

International Journal of Technology Marketing

In recent years, the phenomenon of creative consumers has attracted much research interest. In 2012 for instance, approximately 70 articles in business publications referred specifically to the concept of creative consumers. This and earlier work on creative consumers has helped us to understand who they are, what they are, what they do, and why their activities and outputs are increasingly important to companies. For no longer do business leaders obsess that ideas and innovation must originate from their own firm’s R&D resources. To be competitive, firms now recognise there is significant value in sourcing ideas and innovations from the market place (Kuusisto and Kuusisto, 2013). Like other business activities, including marketing, manufacturing and logistics (see McCarthy and Anagnostou, 2004), innovation is becoming more open, and more outsourced to users, and this is changing the boundaries of the origins, development, and ownership of ideas and intellectual property.

Traditionally, firms have produced goods and services, and customers have consumed or used them. For firms, success came through understanding the needs of their customers well, and then producing and delivering offerings that would satisfy these needs. Or, it came through developing products that customers didn’t know they needed, but which then became a quintessential part of customers’ lives, shaping them in unanticipated ways. The role of customers was essentially passive: they consumed and used offerings for the purposes for which they were intended and seldom altered or modified them in any way. Automobiles were used for traveling from one place to another and baking soda was used for baking cakes, just as the manufacturers of these products had intended. Firms invented and produced, and modified when necessary; consumers only used and consumed. In the recent past however, scholars have observed customers not only using and consuming, but also repurposing, adapting, modifying, hacking and in other ways changing the proprietary offerings of firms. This phenomenon is known as user innovation (von Hippel, 1988, 2005; von Hippel et al., 2012) and includes intermediate users (e.g., user firms) and final consumer users (e.g., individual people and groups of people) (Bogers et al., 2010). This special issue focuses on consumer users. Classic examples of user innovation by consumers, includes innovations in skateboarding, windsurfing, and snowboarding products, in which the proprietary offerings of firms are modified and improved upon by consumers, who then freely share these innovations with other consumers (Shah, 2000; von Hippel, 2001). Morrison et al. (2000) outline the factors that determine these user innovations and how these creations are shared in local markets, and von Hippel (2001) has explored user creativity in one of the first arenas to embrace user driven innovation: open source software. Berthon et al. (2007) focus on ‘creative consumers’, those who start with an existing product and change it, as opposed to innovating completely new products ‘from scratch’. They describe a wide range of actions by creative consumers in a diverse set of products (e.g., automobiles, toys and computers) and services (e.g., user designed and coordinated tours of theme parks and repurposing of delivery service packaging).

European Journal of Marketing, 2015

Emerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.

Creative consumers – consumers who adapt, modify or transform a proprietary offering – represent an intriguing paradox for business. On the one hand they can be a black hole for future revenue, with breach of copyright and intellectual property, while on the other hand they represent a gold mine of ideas and business opportunities. This problem is central to business – business needs to both create and capture value; the problem is that creative consumers demand a shift in the mindsets and business models of how firms both create and capture value. We develop a typology of firms’ stances to creative consumers based upon their attitude and action towards customer innovation. We then consider the implications of the stances model for corporate strategy, and examine a three-step approach to dealing with creative consumers, namely, awareness, analysis and response.

designresearchsociety.org, 2010

Designers as well as business leaders are strictly focusing on co-creation and co-creation activities as an effective method to innovation in business and product development. Paradoxically we seem to forget the perspective of the customers. The intention of this paper is to bring a rhetorical approach to 'co-creation'. This approach emphasizes co-creation as a specific form of rhetorical design discourse directed at customers who are introduced to new creative ways of expressing themselves. The rhetorical perspective also emphasizes how this discourse is capable of constituting its audience in new roles, here as empowered, active and creative people. This co-creation discourse is considered an art 'constitutive rhetoric' (Charland, 1987). The crucial effect of the constitutive rhetoric is the audience claiming its right on behalf of this constitution. This raises the question: when will customers claim their rights on behalf of these new roles-as creative human beings-and how can we possibly develop co-creation and reply to this possible demand? In co-creation sessions designers are appealing to the customers´s creativity by presenting generative tools in order to make the customers express their creativity, their tacit knowledge, their dreams and needs. The paper agrees with Sanders that these generative tools entail the possibility of growing into a new language not restricted to co-creation sessions and organizational development (Sanders, 2002). Using the generative tools is a way of inviting design thinking and creativity into everyday peoples lives, offering them a way of reflecting and responding as creative human beings. Rhetorically this means offering the capacity to act also called 'rhetorical agency' (Hoff-Clausen et all., 2005) and as such a possible solution to customers claiming their rights as creative human beings. The paper will outline different understandings of co-creation as well as bring experiences from co-creation activities conducted in a present research in a Danish bank. The paper will also bring an example of customers claiming their rights.

Despite the universal mantra that "the customer is king," the role of the customer has so far seemed to have been confined to a passive recipient of products. Recently, however, this traditional perception has been challenged. On the one hand, users are increasingly appreciated as reflexive actors who are actively involved in the evaluation, modif ication, and configuration of products. On the other hand, beyond the established repertoire to access external knowledge through interorganizational networks, firms increasingly attempt to harness user knowledge. These two concurrent shifts do not result in a smooth convergence. Rather, they open up a highly contested terrain in which habitual distinctions between the producer and user are blurred. In this article, we map the evolving terrain of user-producer interaction in innovation processes. Specifically, we contrast more traditional approaches to incorporate customer knowledge with an emerging class of innovative userproducer relationships, provisionally dubbed "codevelopment." We then propose a typology of different modes of codevelopment that is organized along two dimensions: the degree of user involvement and the prevailing locus of knowledge production. This typology seeks to capture the heterogeneity of codevelopment approaches and to provide a conceptual template for further empirical research on user involvement in innovation.

Journal of Product Innovation Management, 2015

There is growing belief in the value of actively involving customers in innovation, commonly referred to as customer codevelopment or cocreation. These strategies are generally believed to be beneficial, although contingent views are prevalent. A widely espoused contingent view is that the positive contribution of customer codevelopment is dependent on the degree of radicalness (or innovativeness) of the products being developed. Some work argues that customer codevelopment is more useful for incremental innovation, whereas other work claims that customer codevelopment is more valuable when innovation is radical. This research makes an important contribution to this discourse by making a distinction between utilitarian radicalness and hedonic radicalness. Utilitarian radicalness refers to the degree to which an innovation is novel in terms of technology and functionality, whereas hedonic radicalness refers to the degree to which an innovation is novel in terms of sensorial, emotional, or symbolic aspects. Hypotheses about the contribution of customer codevelopment to market success depending on levels of utilitarian and hedonic radicalness are tested using dual-respondent data about a large sample of innovation projects. The findings suggest that the contribution of customer codevelopment to market success is positively moderated by utilitarian radicalness and negatively moderated by hedonic radicalness. This underlines the importance of taking not only the level, but also the nature, of radicalness into account when making decisions about customer codevelopment. tion. So, when firms intend to develop innovations that are high in both utilitarian and hedonic radicalness, they are advised to engage customers in cocreation only in the development of the utilitarian aspects of the new product, whereas in the hedonic aspects, they are not involved.