‘Systems of Use’ Innovation: Products plus Behaviors

We define a ‘system of use’ as a collection of modules - both products and behaviors - that interact during use to accomplish a system-level goal. For example, products like tennis rackets and tennis shoes, plus behaviors like tennis game strategies, and physical conditioning are all important elements in an individual tennis player's system of use. Previous studies of the locus of innovation have focused upon product innovations only. To better understand how one might empirically study innovations within systems of use in the consumer sector, we conducted a case study in the relatively new sporting field of gravel bike racing. Leading sport participants helped us identify the most important innovations in their sport's system of use, and we explored the innovation histories of these. We found behavioral innovations to be well-represented. Because the topic of study is a sport, we also had a clear and objectively determinable system-level goal: improvements in race completion speeds over time. Rather remarkably, we think, we found that the race performance enhancement contribution from all behavioral innovations in aggregate was 7X higher than the contribution from all product innovations in aggregate. This is especially interesting when one thinks that innovative consumer behaviors are not included at all in measurements of, and valuations of innovation developments that are collected by government statisticians and used by many innovation researchers.