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This chapter shows that free innovation extends well beyond product innovation—the type of innovation focused upon by almost all studies of household sector innovation to date. It reviews field-specific empirical studies that find significant levels of free innovation present in services, processes, marketing methods, and new organizational methods. The chapter also discusses illustrative examples of the sources of innovation across five innovation categories used in official Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) government statistics. Thus, the chapter argues that the scope of free innovation in the household sector is indeed broad—and perhaps as broad as that of producer innovation with respect to products, services, and processes of interest to consumers.

This chapter discusses the main sources of product innovations, thus encompassing R&D, design activity, creativity, imports, foreign direct investment, and the emulation of others. Although there is no neat statistical breakdown of the relative importance of the various sources, R&D is not the sole source of new products. It will be especially important in some industries; but in others—such as the creative industries—design and creativity may be more relevant. For any individual economy, many product innovations may originate from or be supplied from outside the national economy. Emulation is also a major source of innovative new products, and the chapter discusses how emulation may be limited by formal and informal means of protecting intellectual property.

This chapter explores how the principles and methods of cultural evolution can inform our understanding of technology and science. Both technology and science are prime examples of cumulative cultural evolution, with each generation preserving and building upon the achievements of prior generations. A key benefit of an evolutionary approach to technological or scientific change is “population thinking,” where broad trends and patterns are explained in terms of individual-level mechanisms of variation, selection, and transmission. This chapter outlines some of these mechanisms and their implications for technological change, including sources of innovation, types of social learning, facilitatory developmental factors, and cultural transmission mechanisms. The role of external representations and human-constructed environments in technological evolution are explored, and factors are examined which determine the varying rates of technological change over time: from intrinsic characteristics of single technological traits, such as efficacy or manufacturing cost, to larger social and population-level factors, such as population size or social institutions. Science can be viewed as both a product of cultural evolution as well as a form of cultural evolution in its own right. Science and technology constitute separate yet interacting evolutionary processes. Outstanding issues and promising avenues for future investigation are highlighted and potential applications of this work are noted. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.