User entrepreneurship and high technology. A longitudinal case study in the medical device industry in Italy

The study investigates the creation of new ventures, starting from consumption and users. The research on user entrepreneurship has been rapidly developing in recent times, highlighting the importance of user communities and consumers’ passion for innovations that can satisfy unmet needs. Notwithstanding this increasing research effort, most contributions focus on end-user entrepreneurship and in low-tech sectors such as consumer goods or sport industries. This work intends to contribute to the debate by presenting a longitudinal case study of a professional user entrepreneurship in a high-tech sector, i.e., the medical device industry. Adopting the idea of a veterinarian-user, the company has developed a ground-breaking, complex product for the market, becoming an important market reality. The results present the evolution stages in the creation of user entrepreneurship from the generation of the idea till the business scale up and illustrate the contributions of user communities and the role of local clusters.