“What the team discovered, described in a paper that is under review for publication, was that the amount of money individual consumers spent making and improving products was more than twice as large as the amount spent by all British firms combined on product research and development over a three-year period. “We’ve been missing the dark matter of innovation,” Mr. von Hippel said from his office in Cambridge, Mass. “This is a new pattern for how innovations come about.” Carliss Y. Baldwin, a business administration professor at the Harvard Business School, called the research remarkable, adding: “What makes Eric’s work so significant is that it is unprecedented to try to measure the extent of user innovation. He shows that we’ve had on a set of mental blinders.”