Each year, millions of user inventors spend billions of dollars creating innovations for their own use and to satisfy their own needs. Many user entrepreneurs also commercialize their user innovations to the mass market to benefit others and generate financial return. However, because user innovations are inherently self-focused, they often fail to achieve adoption in the mass market, leading to significant social welfare losses. Extant research suggests deploying customer-focused design modifications to improve the diffusion of user innovations. As an alternative to this customer-focused perspective, the authors propose a novel communication strategy that evokes adopters’ creativity to increase adoption. In particular, presenting user innovations’ self-focused goals and related key attributes in a sequence that mismatches adopters’ default innovation learning sequences can evoke adopters’ creative thinking regarding the self-relevance of the user innovations, and in turn enhances adoption. Furthermore, deploying self-focused, user inventor solo (vs. customer-focused, open customer participation) enhancement strategy sustains (vs. attenuates) the proposed effects.

每年，数以百万计的用户发明家花费数十亿美元创造创新，供他们自己使用并满足自己的需求。许多用户企业家还将他们的用户创新商业化到大众市场，以使他人受益并产生经济回报。然而，由于用户创新本质上是以自我为中心的，它们往往无法在大众市场得到采用，从而导致重大的社会福利损失。现有研究表明，部署以客户为中心的设计修改，以改善用户创新的传播。作为这种以客户为中心的观点的替代方案，作者提出了一种新颖的沟通策略，可以唤起采用者的创造力以提高采用率。特别是，以与采用者的默认创新学习序列不匹配的顺序呈现用户创新的以自我为中心的目标和相关关键属性，可以唤起采用者对用户创新自身相关性的创造性思考，进而提高采用率。此外，部署以自我为中心的用户发明人单独（相对于以客户为中心、开放的客户参与）增强策略可以维持（相对于减弱）拟议的效果。