Triggers entrepreneurship among creative consumers

Abstract

While entrepreneurship has received much attention, little research has focused on end user entrepreneurship, which refers to entrepreneurship by consumers who develop innovative solutions that better answer their daily personal needs. This exploratory research aims to provide a deeper understanding of what motivates end user entrepreneurs to found firms. Based on a qualitative study conducted among 20 end user entrepreneurs, our data suggest that three significant factors may lead consumers to switch to an entrepreneur role: (1) intrinsic motivations - passion, enjoyment and the willingness to help others - rather than extrinsic ones - rational search for profit and search for recognition; (2) the lack of alternative ways to diffuse their innovations in the market; (3) favorable life periods with minimum implied risk to their professional activity. This paper contributes to both user innovation and user entrepreneurship literature by extending academic knowledge and provides opportunities for further research.

Introduction

“I'm Gary Fisher. I've been called the founding father of mountain biking. I don't know about that, but I do know this: I love bikes. Riding them, building them, making them better. Cross bikes, mountain bikes, town bikes. Bikes for fun, for transport, for everything. I love them all.”² In the early 1970s, Fisher wanted a bike he could ride off-road, “away from cops, cars, and concrete.”³ He went on to develop a new genre of biking. Later, he decided to go into business and created a bicycle company called Mountain Bikes. Similarly, during his spare time, Marc Grégoire invented a new non-stick material for fishing: Teflon®. His wife suggested he might coat her set of cooking pans to make washing-up easier.⁴ After registering a patent, Grégoire decided “to sell the idea to the manufacturers. But they took no notice of him” (Le Masson, Weil, & Hatchuel, 2010). At this point, he subsequently decided to produce non-stick cookware and to create his own firm, “Tefal,” which became a part of the global Group SEB. Both Fisher's and Grégoire's anecdotal cases are striking illustrations of the phenomenon of user entrepreneurship (Shah & Tripsas, 2007). User entrepreneurship describes the new venture creation and commercialization of a new product or service by an individual or group of individuals who are also users of the product or service and who experience a need for improvement (Shah & Tripsas, 2007). This need can be related to a job (professional user entrepreneurs) or personal use (end user entrepreneurs).

Empirical studies have shown that 10.7% of all startups and 46.6% of innovative startups (that survived to their fifth year) created in the United States in 2004 were founded by users (Shah, Winston Smith, & Reedy, 2011). Other studies find that 29% of US-based medical device startups and 84% of large and small firms in the juvenile products industries (263 firms created between 1980 and 2007) were founded by users (physicians in the first case and parents, babysitters and caregivers in the second) (Chatterji, 2009; Shah et al., 2011; Shah and Tripsas, 2007, Shah and Tripsas, 2016). Over the past 10 years, these empirical patterns highlighted the magnitude and importance of user entrepreneurship for the industrial system (Winston Smith & Shah, 2014). However, as firm founders, end users (in contrast with professional users) remain relatively unexplored by scholars, even though the Kauffman Firm Survey, conducted among a sample of 5000 startups launched in 2004, showed that 40% of user entrepreneur firms were created by end user entrepreneurs (Shah et al., 2011).⁵

This exploratory study focuses exclusively on consumer entrepreneurs and aims to extend our knowledge of this unconventional but growing form of production. More precisely, we aim to shed light on why, in some cases, innovative consumers decide to diffuse and commercialize a solution they have developed for their own use, by creating their own business and starting a for-profit company. To address this aim, we interviewed 20 innovative consumers who developed a product or service related to their daily consumption experience and, subsequently, decided to found firms. Based on our results, we develop a set of research propositions about the factors that lead consumers to switch to an entrepreneurial role.