How Community Matters for User Innovation: the "open Source" of Sports Innovation the Authors Thank Eric Von Hippel for His Advice and Support. Many Thanks Also to Carliss How Community Matters for User Innovation: the "open Source" of Sports Innovation

the students of the "Empirical Methods" course at the University of Munich, and participants at the Harvard Business School "Open Source" Lunch for their time, advice, and stimulating discussions. Abstract This exploratory study analyzes the context within which end-users develop sports-related consumer product innovations. We find that end-user innovators who are members of voluntary special-interest user communities often receive assistance in developing their innovations from fellow community members. Within these user communities, we find that innovation-related information and assistance, as well as the innovations themselves, are freely shared. The processes by which these voluntary user innovation communities operate and the "institutional" structure supporting innovation and free sharing of iimovations may be of general interest both within and beyond the consumer products arena. Communities of open source software developers, for example, appear to operate in very similar ways.