User-driven innovation: scale development and validation

In dynamic business environments entrepreneurs increasingly strive to customise new products/services to displayed and latent user needs. User-driven innovation (U.D.I.) aims to incorporate user needs by giving users an active role in the innovation process. Despite the growing interest of researchers in U.D.I., empirical evidence remains scarce, because of a lack of a psychometrically sound instrument to enhance insight into U.D.I. This paper derives an integrative definition of U.D.I. from different U.D.I. research streams and proposes a model with three distinctive dimensions of U.D.I.: user involvement, searching feedback and design orientation. Three consecutive studies result in a 13-item U.D.I. scale with appropriate reliability, dimensionality, convergent and discriminant validity. Pilot studies include researchers, entrepreneurs and practitioners. The main study comprises data of 357 S.M.E.s. The analyses confirm the multidimensionality of the proposed construct. This study contributes to existing research of U.D.I. in entrepreneurship by addressing the multidimensional nature of U.D.I. with a new research instrument. The proposed U.D.I. scale can be used in future investigations of U.D.I. The construct is informative also for practitioners in introducing U.D.I. to their companies.