Latent User Demand

Latent user demand is the invisible economy of needs that exist but have never been acted upon—the specific, heterogeneous requirements of millions of users who would have built solutions if the cost had been low enough, but endured mismatches instead because it was not. Eric von Hippel’s cost-threshold framework for user innovation predicts this reservoir structurally: the population of users who find it rational to innovate is determined by the ratio between the cost of building and the benefit of a solution. Every user above the threshold innovates; every user below it endures. The conventional innovation economy, which counted only the innovations producers brought to market, systematically missed the endured mismatches—the adaptations users made to ill-fitting tools, the workarounds they developed, the problems they described in surveys but never solved. That uncounted reservoir is latent user demand, and its magnitude is, von Hippel’s research suggests, vastly larger than the visible stream of producer innovation. The natural language interface did