The purposes of this paper are to find users’innovations in the mountain climbing product market in Japan, then to identify the attributive and structural characteristics of innovating users who develop the users’innovations. It has been pointed out that manufacturers should utilize the users’innovations in their new product development processes. However there have been few cases that a manufacturer actually utilized users’innovations to develop a new product. This is partly because the manufacturer could not recognize the importance of utilizing the users’innovations or could not find users’innovations in the market. This paper shows mainly two results based on statistical analysis. First this paper shows that there exists a certain number of innovating users in the mountain climbing product market in Japan and some lead users who developed commercially successful products even though experts familiar with the market observed few innovating users. Second this paper identifies a formula to distinguish between innovating and non-innovating users. The results given in this paper provide manufactures with incentives to find and utilize users’innovations in their new product development processes.

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The necessity of open innovation and external linkage has become widely known recently. However in R&D management independent development or external linkage utilization a chips, one of the typical new technologies, we demonstrate that the research and development strategies differs depending on the difference of management resources of each enterprise based on the patent data, using the cases of Canon which drives independent development and HitachiSoft which promotes open innovation.

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