Manufacturers benefit by dividing their innovation processes into distinct phases in order to ensure that development activities are performed efficiently. Users are expected to follow a more intuition-driven approach. In this paper, we analyse the way users improve or develop novel products. The field of our research is a new and rapidly evolving consumer market, the sport of kite surfing. We identified a sequence that underlies the approaches of user inventors. This sequence consists of two major stages, (1) idea generation and (2) idea realisation, each stage is further subdivided. We propose that a manufacturer can significantly profit from more closely observing such user activities.