Entrepreneurial opportunities with toolkits for user innovation and design

This article discusses a promising entrepreneurial opportunity: toolkits for user innovation and design. This innovative method of new product development (NDP) shifts the design task to the customer by making use of recent developments in IT, media, and production technologies. The customer, in turn, gets a product that perfectly suits his/her needs. This new approach challenges the time-consuming and costly traditional approach of screening the market for new product needs which are then converted into novel or adapted products. Our analysis shows that there are basically two different ways to exploit this opportunity. First, by means of high-end toolkits, radically new products can be gathered. Second, low-end toolkits can be used efficiently to further exploit seemingly mature markets. We argue that in particular startups might be in the best position to take advantage of these entrepreneurial opportunities. They can either enter the arena of manufacturers or they can act as new intermediaries between manufacturers and users.