Unstick Tsugoes for Innovative Interaction of Market Stakeholders

Introduction

Sticky information (Eric von Hippel, 1994, 2006) means the tendency of information to be localized in the brains of individual people, who may be either an inventor in the industrial (developing, producing, and selling) side or a consumer in the buying/consuming side. The information about the requirements of consumers and the technological knowledge of inventors are hard to be transferred between inventors and consumers, so the mutual understanding of these stakeholders of each product/service tends to be suspended. This dilemma may occur even between inventors, so sometimes collaborations in a firm come to be difficult. As a result, contextual gaps occur between stakeholders in the market. For example, users of products tend to propose new designs oriented to satisfy their own requirements, whereas manufacturers tend to design products to improve the quality of usage such as efficiency from solution-intensive viewpoint (Ogawa, 1998). Such a gap may not be serious if the proposal from users can be easily implemented by just applying existing established techniques or if users get satisfied by the improvement of efficiency. However, this does not stand for innovations where a radical shift of social trend is addressed by the proposed idea: For example, advantages of “big data” cannot be fully taken without bringing experts of grid computing and of data mining/visualization or having them understand users’ saying “we desire to detect opportunities and risks in business that could not be covered by previous data.” In such domains, information stickiness can be regarded as a negative factor to innovation, i.e., a cause to disturb the creation of meaningful jumps in humans’ life, as far as inventors do not have specially keen sense of users’ demands.

Information, however, is quite a vague concept including multiple types, if we take technical viewpoints. That is, it is hard to answer questions such as “what kind of information should consumers open to inventors and vice versa, i.e., what are pieces of information that should be unstuck for urging innovation?,” “what can we do for the unsticking, and what are tools for enabling it?” etc., that are essential for an innovative communication. From this viewpoint, here let us pay attention to the tendency that those pieces of information exemplified by von Hippel (1994, 2006) and by leading researchers such as Ogawa (1999) studying the effects of sticky information and the effect of unsticking (i.e., enabling stakeholders to share sticky information owned locally by a certain group of people, with others) tend to be about latent or hidden reasons for decisions and actions, rather than all kinds of information.