Innovators and Tinkerers Role in Business: A General and Technical Analysis

This book investigates various drivers of innovation within small businesses, as well as the role that innovation plays in creating value in small businesses. The analysis suggests that additions in employee headcount increase innovation while growth in sales does not increase innovation. The analysis also finds that increases in research and development ('R&D') expenditures enhance small business value in certain industries, but not uniformly and not in all the industries investigated. The authors of this book find that the number of patents owned by a small business is not a good indicator of a firm's value. Moreover, this book has a model of agents called tinkerers who want to improve a technology for their own reasons, by their own criteria, and who see no way to profit from it. Under these conditions, they would rather share their technology than work alone. This book places open source technology development in an abstract, deductive model. Within the model, a new industry appears when a tinkerer envisions a way to profit from the technology, and leaves the network to try that. In the cases described, amateur tinkering eventually led to increases in commercial output and productivity. This book consists of public documents which have been located, gathered, combined, reformatted, and enhanced with a subject index, selectively edited and bound to provide easy access.