The focus of scholars studying user innovation has been restricted to the interaction between companies and individual users, and how companies can unilaterally exploit values from the value chain between companies and users. We argue that the value chain between the user and manufacturer should be a bilateral value chain in which both the user and manufacturer can conduct their own innovations and provide greater value to the whole value chain. In this paper, using examples from China's civil-military integration project, we took a step forward to apply the user innovation theory in the explanation of inter-sector technological value transfer. The main theoretical contribution of this paper is the expansion of the scope of application of the user innovation theory to inter-sector level research. Studying cases from China's civil-military integration project, we found that the concepts of user and innovator become blurred when we study the phenomenon across time. When we go beyond individual user and manufacturer and shift the focus of our discussion to the level of inter-sector technological value transfer, we will find that it is possible for organizational agents at large to be both users and innovators of technology.
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