Article ID: | iaor19991566 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 44 |
Issue: | 5 |
Start Page Number: | 629 |
End Page Number: | 644 |
Publication Date: | May 1998 |
Journal: | Management Science |
Authors: | Hippel Eric von |
Keywords: | marketing, information, design |
Those who solve more of a given type of problem tend to get better at it—which suggests that problems of any given type should be brought to specialists for a solution. However, in this paper we argue that agency-related costs and information transfer costs (‘sticky’ local information) will tend to drive the locus of problem-solving in the opposite direction—away from problem-solving by specialist suppliers, and towards those who directly benefit from a solution and who have difficult-to-transfer local information about a particular application being solved, such as the direct users of a product or service. We examine the actual location of design activities in two fields in which custom products are produced by ‘mass-customization’ methods: application-specific integrated circuits and computer telephony integration systems. In both, we find that users rather than suppliers are the actual designers of the application-specific portion of the product types examined. We offer anecdotal evidence that the pattern of user-based customization we have documented in these two fields is in fact quite general, and we discuss implications for research and practice.