Eric von Hippel
Encyclopedia
Eric von Hippel is an economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management
, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation
. He is best known for his work developing the concept of user innovation
– that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of new innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, he introduced the term lead user
in 1986. von Hippel's work has applications in business strategy and free
/open source software (FOSS) and von Hippel is one of the most highly cited social scientists writing on FOSS.
Eric von Hippel is the son of the material scientist and physicist
Arthur Robert von Hippel who was also a professor at MIT. His great uncle is the German
ophthalmologist Eugen von Hippel
.
The BUGvonHippel is a breakout board module and an example of open-source hardware. It is named for von Hippel and its enclosure bears his name in Braille
.
After pursuing several inventions post undergraduate, Eric returned to school for his Masters in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. From there, he went on to start his own company, worked at management consultant McKinsey and Co.
, and eventually studied at Carnegie Mellon University
for his Ph.D. in Innovation.
User innovation is the idea that more users and consumers are the innovators of new products instead of suppliers. Eric von Hippel was one of the first to notice this trend and explore it. Products made by manufacturers are developed to meet a wide range of needs and a wide range of people. Therefore when a particular user experiences needs that are not yet felt by the majority of consumers, they make the adjustments themselves to meet their own needs. Often these ideas are then fed back to manufacturing companies through these users in hopes that the product will then be produced for them. This process is called free revealing. User innovation can be seen across a wide range of products from home cleaning products, to medical device products. User innovation in scientific instruments has even been found to be a user dominated field through von Hippel’s research. User innovation doesn’t only extend to tangible products but also services. Von Hippel found that eighty-five percent of individuals self-provided themselves with accounting and banking processes before banks offered this service.
An extension of use innovations is the idea of lead users. These are the individuals who first feel the need for a product or service and create it for themselves. Lead user identification is an essential method used by companies to identify the newest innovations in their product areas giving them crucial insight on the needs of their users.
STICKY INFORMATION AND ITS USES
Sticky information is a term used to describe information that is expensive to obtain, transmit, and employ in a new location than where it originated. “We define the stickiness of a given unit of information in a given instance as the incremental expenditure required to transfer that unit of information to a specified locus in a form usable by a given information seeker. When this cost is low, information stickiness is low; when it is high, stickiness is high,” (von Hippel, 1994). Eric von Hippel has worked to define how sticky information influences innovation and how to overcome stickiness when trying to develop a new technology. Sticky information is often encountered when a manufacturers would like to know about how current users feel about their needs and if their needs are being met or not by current product lines. However this information would be difficult to acquire for the manufacturer, though it would be tremendously helpful in their pursuit of product innovation.
Information can be sticky for a number of reasons. Much information that humans have is tacit, and therefore is difficult to communicate when sharing information. Additionally, some technical information is composed of a very large number of parts. Sometimes it is difficult to communicate all of these especially when some operating procedures or techniques are so routine, a regular practitioner may forget to include such details.
The stickiness of a particular type of information can have influences on how advances are made in the field. For example, if a particular company holds much of the expertise and knowledge for a particular technology it will likely be difficult for another company to make advancements that originate from the original technology. New innovations are more likely to occur in the original company. This can also occur in a geographic manner. Local information can also be sticky and innovations that help a particular area with a special problem are likely to come from that area as well.
INNOVATION TOOLKITS
On Professor Von Hippel’s website, it is stated that innovation toolkits are used to organize and support information that is shared amongst various users and producers of projects. In one of his papers entitled “Perspective: User toolkits for innovation,” Von Hippel describes how user toolkits can be used to help manufacturers and companies determine the users’ need-related aspects of products and services. The users are provided with “user toolkits for innovation,” to help the manufacturer outsource tasks that would normally take much time and effort within the company. One of the first areas that user toolkits have been used was in the design and manufacturing of custom integrated circuits. In this field it was critical that manufacturers understood user needs because it could result in months of delays costing the company thousands of dollars. LSI Logic produced a software design tool that its customers could use to design circuits themselves. This move helped LSI grow to be one of the major players in the custom IC market and competitors were soon moving in the same direction.
“Toolkits for user innovation are coordinated sets of “user-friendly” design tools that enable users to develop new product innovations for themselves. The toolkits are not general purpose. Rather, they are specific to the design challenges of a specific field or sub field, such as integrated circuit design or software product design.”
MEASUREMENTS OF INNOVATION / INNOVATION INDICATORS
Researchers have not started quantifying user innovation until recently. It is important that researchers are able to measure innovation and gather statistics so that policymakers can see the impact of user innovation on modern day technologies. Research has shown that many of the innovative products produced by manufacturers were ideas stemmed off from “lead users.” Eric Von Hippel has written several papers regarding “Measurements of Innovation” and “Innovation Indicators.” In one of his papers, he discusses his work with Fred Gault to survey 1,219 Canadian manufacturing plants to determine the prevalence of user innovation. They were able to determine that “About 20% of the user-innovators surveyed reported transferring their innovations to other users and/or equipment suppliers – and the majority of these at least sometimes did so at no charge to recipients.” These types of innovation indicators will help the government and other researchers to see the impact of users on innovation.
METHODS
INNOVATION STRATEGIES AND LEAD USER IDENTIFICATION
Eric Von Hippel has focused on the following major areas of innovation strategies in his research:
• Task partitioning
• Improvement of innovation processes
• Pyramiding
Task partitioning refers to innovation projects that are partitioned into smaller tasks. Professor Von Hippel proposes that “problem-solving inter-dependence among tasks can be predicted in many projects and can then be managed by strategies involving (1) adjustment of the task specifications and/or (2) reduction of the barriers to problem-solving interaction across selected or all task boundaries.”
Professor Von Hippel calls attention to the improvement of innovation processes with great detail. He feels that the processes call for more scrutiny and that in turn “their improvement can significantly affect the kinds of research problems that can be addressed, the efficiency and speed with which R&D can be performed, and the competitive positions of firms employing them.”
Through his papers, Eric Von Hippel deems it critical for market researchers to look for lead users, “users who are on the leading edge of each identified trend in terms of related new product and process and who expect to obtain a relatively high net benefit from solutions to those needs.” Pyramiding is a search process based upon the view that people with a strong interest in a topic or field tend to know people more expert than themselves. Von Hippel states that it can sometimes be hard to identify lead users or the next CEO of any given company and pyramiding can assist in this process.
• von Hippel, Eric (2005) "Open source software projects as user innovation networks - no manufacturer required." in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. Lakhani. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Lakhani, Karim and Eric von Hippel (2003) “How Open Source Software Works: “Free” User-to-User Assistance,” Research Policy Vol 32 No. 6 , (June) Pages 923-943
• Von Krogh, Georg and Eric von Hippel (2006) “The High Promise of Research on Open Source Software,” Management Science vol 52, No. 7 (July) pp. 975–983
• Von Hippel, Eric and Georg von Krogh (2006) “Free Revealing and the Private-Collective Model for Innovation Incentives,” R&D Management vol 36, No. 3, pp. 291–302.
• von Hippel, Eric and Georg von Krogh (2003), “Open Source Software and the “Private-Collective” Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science” Organization Science 14 (2)208-223.
• Von Krogh, Georg and Eric von Hippel (2003), “Open Source Software: Introduction to a Special Issue of Research Policy,” Research Policy Vol 32, No. 7, (July) pp. 1149–57.
Another person who Professor Von Hippel has worked with on writing some of his papers is his former student, Karim R. Lakhani, who is currently an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. For more information please see the description under “Progeny.”
Marcie Tyre and Eric Von Hippel have worked together on several papers as well. Marcie is currently a Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center. Her research focuses on “the experience of mothering and becoming a mother in contemporary America.” Prior to Brandeis, Tyre taught Management of Technology from 1988 to 1999 at MIT’s Sloan School. Some of the papers that Tyre and Von Hippel have worked on together include the following:
• Tyre, Marcie and Eric von Hippel (1997) "The Situated Nature of Adaptive Learning in Organizations" Organization Science , vol 8, No 1 (January-February) p. 71-83
• von Hippel, Eric and Marcie Tyre (1996) "The Mechanics of Learning by Doing: Problem Discovery During Process Machine Use." Technology and Culture 37 no.2 (April) p. 312-329.
• von Hippel, Eric and Marcie Tyre (1995) "How "Learning by Doing" is Done: Problem Identification in Novel Process Equipment." Vol 24, No.1 Research Policy (January) p. 1-12.
Professor Von Hippel looks to the work of Professor Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford University whose research looks at the economics of technological change, the economic role of science, as well as economic history and development. Professor Richard Nelson of Columbia University, who focuses on the processes of long-run economic change, with particular emphasis on technological advances. As well as Professor Ann Carter of Brandeis who specializes in the fields of changing specialization of businesses and of workers, economics of information, technical change, and technology transfer. Professor Von Hippel also see’s Dr. Nikolaus Franke of Vienna University as a great influence in the field of product innovation, Dr. Franke runs an institute on lead user innovation methods, and also focuses on market research .
who was a psychologist and a philosopher that focused on learning about the stages of kids lives from observations.
In this leisure time when he’s not inventing something, he enjoys talking to people and spending time with his children. His family, whom he loves dearly, includes his wife, Jessie, who is a tennis player, a daughter Christiana who studies at Smith College, and a son, Eric James. The family has a cockatiel named Merlin.
When Eric Von Hippel’s daughter was young, he often made up cat-related bedtime stories because cats were her favorite animal. When Christiana was 14 and he was traveling with her they took the opportunity to write these stories down and the stories are entitled “Christiana in Catlandia.”
MIT Sloan School of Management
The MIT Sloan School of Management is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts....
, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation
Innovation
Innovation is the creation of better or more effective products, processes, technologies, or ideas that are accepted by markets, governments, and society...
. He is best known for his work developing the concept of user innovation
User innovation
User innovation refers to innovation by intermediate users or consumer users , rather than by suppliers ....
– that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of new innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, he introduced the term lead user
Lead user
Lead user is a term developed by Eric von Hippel in 1986 . His definition for lead user is:# Lead users face needs that will be general in a marketplace – but face them months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them, and...
in 1986. von Hippel's work has applications in business strategy and free
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
/open source software (FOSS) and von Hippel is one of the most highly cited social scientists writing on FOSS.
Eric von Hippel is the son of the material scientist and physicist
Physicist
A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...
Arthur Robert von Hippel who was also a professor at MIT. His great uncle is the German
Germans
The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
ophthalmologist Eugen von Hippel
Eugen von Hippel
Eugen von Hippel was a German ophthalmologist who was born in Königsberg. He studied medicine in Heidelberg under ophthalmologist Theodor Leber and neurologist Wilhelm Heinrich Erb . In 1897 he attained the title of "professor extraordinary" at Heidelberg, and in 1909 became a professor at the...
.
The BUGvonHippel is a breakout board module and an example of open-source hardware. It is named for von Hippel and its enclosure bears his name in Braille
Braille
The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write, and was the first digital form of writing.Braille was devised in 1825 by Louis Braille, a blind Frenchman. Each Braille character, or cell, is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two...
.
Early life
Eric von Hippel grew up in suburban Weston, MA with his parents, three brothers, and one sister. In his early years, Eric attended public school within the town, but then moved on to the Cambridge School of Weston – a private progressive school - for 8th grade, as well as his latter years. Even as a young child, outside of the classroom, one of Eric’s favorite past times was to try to create and invent new things. Much of his inspiration came from his father, Arthur Robert von Hippel who was also a professor at MIT.Education
For his undergraduate degree, Eric von Hippel attended Harvard College. In an interview with Eric, he cited that he chose Harvard over MIT for the opportunity to pursue Liberal Arts, as he majored in Economics. His decision to focus in Economics stemmed from his trials in Biology and History, and finding that neither was particularly the right fit for him.After pursuing several inventions post undergraduate, Eric returned to school for his Masters in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. From there, he went on to start his own company, worked at management consultant McKinsey and Co.
McKinsey & Company
McKinsey & Company, Inc. is a global management consulting firm that focuses on solving issues of concern to senior management. McKinsey serves as an adviser to many businesses, governments, and institutions...
, and eventually studied at Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
for his Ph.D. in Innovation.
Degrees
- Copenhagen Business School Ph.D. 2007 (Hon)
- Ludwig-Maximillians Universität München Ph.D. 2004 (Hon)
- Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. 1974
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology S.M. 1966
- Harvard College B.A. 1964
Major works
INNOVATION BY USERS AND LEAD USERSUser innovation is the idea that more users and consumers are the innovators of new products instead of suppliers. Eric von Hippel was one of the first to notice this trend and explore it. Products made by manufacturers are developed to meet a wide range of needs and a wide range of people. Therefore when a particular user experiences needs that are not yet felt by the majority of consumers, they make the adjustments themselves to meet their own needs. Often these ideas are then fed back to manufacturing companies through these users in hopes that the product will then be produced for them. This process is called free revealing. User innovation can be seen across a wide range of products from home cleaning products, to medical device products. User innovation in scientific instruments has even been found to be a user dominated field through von Hippel’s research. User innovation doesn’t only extend to tangible products but also services. Von Hippel found that eighty-five percent of individuals self-provided themselves with accounting and banking processes before banks offered this service.
An extension of use innovations is the idea of lead users. These are the individuals who first feel the need for a product or service and create it for themselves. Lead user identification is an essential method used by companies to identify the newest innovations in their product areas giving them crucial insight on the needs of their users.
STICKY INFORMATION AND ITS USES
Sticky information is a term used to describe information that is expensive to obtain, transmit, and employ in a new location than where it originated. “We define the stickiness of a given unit of information in a given instance as the incremental expenditure required to transfer that unit of information to a specified locus in a form usable by a given information seeker. When this cost is low, information stickiness is low; when it is high, stickiness is high,” (von Hippel, 1994). Eric von Hippel has worked to define how sticky information influences innovation and how to overcome stickiness when trying to develop a new technology. Sticky information is often encountered when a manufacturers would like to know about how current users feel about their needs and if their needs are being met or not by current product lines. However this information would be difficult to acquire for the manufacturer, though it would be tremendously helpful in their pursuit of product innovation.
Information can be sticky for a number of reasons. Much information that humans have is tacit, and therefore is difficult to communicate when sharing information. Additionally, some technical information is composed of a very large number of parts. Sometimes it is difficult to communicate all of these especially when some operating procedures or techniques are so routine, a regular practitioner may forget to include such details.
The stickiness of a particular type of information can have influences on how advances are made in the field. For example, if a particular company holds much of the expertise and knowledge for a particular technology it will likely be difficult for another company to make advancements that originate from the original technology. New innovations are more likely to occur in the original company. This can also occur in a geographic manner. Local information can also be sticky and innovations that help a particular area with a special problem are likely to come from that area as well.
INNOVATION TOOLKITS
On Professor Von Hippel’s website, it is stated that innovation toolkits are used to organize and support information that is shared amongst various users and producers of projects. In one of his papers entitled “Perspective: User toolkits for innovation,” Von Hippel describes how user toolkits can be used to help manufacturers and companies determine the users’ need-related aspects of products and services. The users are provided with “user toolkits for innovation,” to help the manufacturer outsource tasks that would normally take much time and effort within the company. One of the first areas that user toolkits have been used was in the design and manufacturing of custom integrated circuits. In this field it was critical that manufacturers understood user needs because it could result in months of delays costing the company thousands of dollars. LSI Logic produced a software design tool that its customers could use to design circuits themselves. This move helped LSI grow to be one of the major players in the custom IC market and competitors were soon moving in the same direction.
“Toolkits for user innovation are coordinated sets of “user-friendly” design tools that enable users to develop new product innovations for themselves. The toolkits are not general purpose. Rather, they are specific to the design challenges of a specific field or sub field, such as integrated circuit design or software product design.”
MEASUREMENTS OF INNOVATION / INNOVATION INDICATORS
Researchers have not started quantifying user innovation until recently. It is important that researchers are able to measure innovation and gather statistics so that policymakers can see the impact of user innovation on modern day technologies. Research has shown that many of the innovative products produced by manufacturers were ideas stemmed off from “lead users.” Eric Von Hippel has written several papers regarding “Measurements of Innovation” and “Innovation Indicators.” In one of his papers, he discusses his work with Fred Gault to survey 1,219 Canadian manufacturing plants to determine the prevalence of user innovation. They were able to determine that “About 20% of the user-innovators surveyed reported transferring their innovations to other users and/or equipment suppliers – and the majority of these at least sometimes did so at no charge to recipients.” These types of innovation indicators will help the government and other researchers to see the impact of users on innovation.
METHODS
INNOVATION STRATEGIES AND LEAD USER IDENTIFICATION
Eric Von Hippel has focused on the following major areas of innovation strategies in his research:
• Task partitioning
• Improvement of innovation processes
• Pyramiding
Task partitioning refers to innovation projects that are partitioned into smaller tasks. Professor Von Hippel proposes that “problem-solving inter-dependence among tasks can be predicted in many projects and can then be managed by strategies involving (1) adjustment of the task specifications and/or (2) reduction of the barriers to problem-solving interaction across selected or all task boundaries.”
Professor Von Hippel calls attention to the improvement of innovation processes with great detail. He feels that the processes call for more scrutiny and that in turn “their improvement can significantly affect the kinds of research problems that can be addressed, the efficiency and speed with which R&D can be performed, and the competitive positions of firms employing them.”
Through his papers, Eric Von Hippel deems it critical for market researchers to look for lead users, “users who are on the leading edge of each identified trend in terms of related new product and process and who expect to obtain a relatively high net benefit from solutions to those needs.” Pyramiding is a search process based upon the view that people with a strong interest in a topic or field tend to know people more expert than themselves. Von Hippel states that it can sometimes be hard to identify lead users or the next CEO of any given company and pyramiding can assist in this process.
- The Sources of Innovation (1988) ISBN 0-19-509422-0, Oxford University Press PDF
- Democratizing InnovationDemocratizing InnovationDemocratizing Innovation is the title of a book by Eric von Hippel. It describes how people participate in the development of products they use. For example, von Hippel in the fifth chapter uses the history of mountain biking to propound that users can also "be sophisticated developers". The MIT...
(2005) ISBN 0-262-22074-1, Creative Commons PDF
Progeny
Professor Eric Von Hippel currently teaches both PhD students and post doctorates. One of his former PhD students was Karim R. Lakhani, who is currently an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Karim studied under Von Hippel at MIT and was awarded his Ph.D in management in 2006. He is a co-founder of the MIT-based Open Source research community and web portal, and has served as a “Lecturer in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship group at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.” Here are two of the papers that Von Hippel and Lakhani have worked together on:• von Hippel, Eric (2005) "Open source software projects as user innovation networks - no manufacturer required." in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam, and K. Lakhani. Cambridge: MIT Press.
• Lakhani, Karim and Eric von Hippel (2003) “How Open Source Software Works: “Free” User-to-User Assistance,” Research Policy Vol 32 No. 6 , (June) Pages 923-943
Collaborators
Professor Von Hippel has many colleagues and collaborators who he has worked with on papers that he has written. One of his collaborators is Georg Von Krogh who is a professor at ETH Zurich and holds the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation. The papers that they have worked on together are listed below:• Von Krogh, Georg and Eric von Hippel (2006) “The High Promise of Research on Open Source Software,” Management Science vol 52, No. 7 (July) pp. 975–983
• Von Hippel, Eric and Georg von Krogh (2006) “Free Revealing and the Private-Collective Model for Innovation Incentives,” R&D Management vol 36, No. 3, pp. 291–302.
• von Hippel, Eric and Georg von Krogh (2003), “Open Source Software and the “Private-Collective” Innovation Model: Issues for Organization Science” Organization Science 14 (2)208-223.
• Von Krogh, Georg and Eric von Hippel (2003), “Open Source Software: Introduction to a Special Issue of Research Policy,” Research Policy Vol 32, No. 7, (July) pp. 1149–57.
Another person who Professor Von Hippel has worked with on writing some of his papers is his former student, Karim R. Lakhani, who is currently an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. For more information please see the description under “Progeny.”
Marcie Tyre and Eric Von Hippel have worked together on several papers as well. Marcie is currently a Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center. Her research focuses on “the experience of mothering and becoming a mother in contemporary America.” Prior to Brandeis, Tyre taught Management of Technology from 1988 to 1999 at MIT’s Sloan School. Some of the papers that Tyre and Von Hippel have worked on together include the following:
• Tyre, Marcie and Eric von Hippel (1997) "The Situated Nature of Adaptive Learning in Organizations" Organization Science , vol 8, No 1 (January-February) p. 71-83
• von Hippel, Eric and Marcie Tyre (1996) "The Mechanics of Learning by Doing: Problem Discovery During Process Machine Use." Technology and Culture 37 no.2 (April) p. 312-329.
• von Hippel, Eric and Marcie Tyre (1995) "How "Learning by Doing" is Done: Problem Identification in Novel Process Equipment." Vol 24, No.1 Research Policy (January) p. 1-12.
Inspiration and Influences
Even as a child Professor Von Hippel was an innovative one as he likes to point out “(when you’re a child) if you don’t like what you have you make it yourself.” Like the skateboards and scooters of the past generations kid designed and produced these products for themselves because they were not available to them otherwise. Professor Von Hippel became very interested in this phenomenon and how it worked, which guided his path to where he is today.Professor Von Hippel looks to the work of Professor Nathan Rosenberg of Stanford University whose research looks at the economics of technological change, the economic role of science, as well as economic history and development. Professor Richard Nelson of Columbia University, who focuses on the processes of long-run economic change, with particular emphasis on technological advances. As well as Professor Ann Carter of Brandeis who specializes in the fields of changing specialization of businesses and of workers, economics of information, technical change, and technology transfer. Professor Von Hippel also see’s Dr. Nikolaus Franke of Vienna University as a great influence in the field of product innovation, Dr. Franke runs an institute on lead user innovation methods, and also focuses on market research .
Additional Information
In an interview with Professor Eric Von Hippel he stated that his favorite aspect of his job was doing research, teaching and specifically, working with doctoral students. His own favorite teacher was a high school biology teacher, “a wonderful guy,” Von Hippel describes, and who showed him incredible new things in a new light. His idol is Jean PiagetJean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....
who was a psychologist and a philosopher that focused on learning about the stages of kids lives from observations.
In this leisure time when he’s not inventing something, he enjoys talking to people and spending time with his children. His family, whom he loves dearly, includes his wife, Jessie, who is a tennis player, a daughter Christiana who studies at Smith College, and a son, Eric James. The family has a cockatiel named Merlin.
When Eric Von Hippel’s daughter was young, he often made up cat-related bedtime stories because cats were her favorite animal. When Christiana was 14 and he was traveling with her they took the opportunity to write these stories down and the stories are entitled “Christiana in Catlandia.”
Future Works
Professor Von Hippel’s plans for the future include getting concepts into government statistics to measure how many users innovate and what types of people do this type of work. Then he would like to show that most innovation is still user innovation. He finds it interesting that in the UK, 8% (3-4 million people) of consumers modify the product that they use. He also noted that hospitals have the right to develop and use ideas as long as they do not sell them and he would like to get the institutional review board to approve development in hospital use. In this way, doctors would do innovation first, and then companies would harness this innovation in order to develop. He stressed the fact that the number of consumers modifying products and thereby innovating outweighs the number of people doing this in companies! We should be able to harness this natural innovation and use it to our benefit to market!See also
- User innovationUser innovationUser innovation refers to innovation by intermediate users or consumer users , rather than by suppliers ....
- Lead userLead userLead user is a term developed by Eric von Hippel in 1986 . His definition for lead user is:# Lead users face needs that will be general in a marketplace – but face them months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them, and...
- Toolkit for User Innovation and Design
- Private-Collective Model of InnovationPrivate-collective model of innovationThe term private-collective model of innovation was coined by Eric von Hippel and Georg von Krogh in their 2003 publication in Organization Science...
External links
- UserInnovation.dk The largest resource center for user innovation
- Eric von Hippel's homepage at MIT.
- Available research papers.
- OpenInnovators.de - die erste Commnunity zu Open Innovation im deutschsprachigen Raum.
- The Economics of Open Content Symposium: New Models of Creative Production in the Digital Age Collaboration and the Marketplace
- Openeur - Open Innovation & Entrepreneurship - MCPC2007-Keynote by Eric von Hippel at MIT
- Bug Labs: BUGvonHippel