Quotes from Eric von Hippel

Innovation user and innovation manufacturer are the two general functional relationships between innovator and innovation. Users are unique in that they alone benefit directly from innovations. All others (here lumped under

individual or a small group seeking a solution to an individual's or a

The user-centered innovation process just illustrated is in sharp contrast to the traditional model, in which products and services are developed by manufacturers in a closed way, the manufacturers using patents, copyrights, and other protections to prevent imitators from free riding on their innovation investments. In this traditional model, a user's only role is to have needs, which manufacturers then

strongly agreed with the statement that their need information came from personal needs they

In this subsection I offer an explanation for the puzzle by pointing out that free revealing is often the best practical option available to user innovators. Harhoff, Henkel, and von Hippel (2003) found that it is in practice very difficult for most innovators to protect their innovations from direct or approximate imitation. This means that the practical choice is typically not the one posited by the private investment model: should innovators voluntarily freely reveal

involve various other extreme conditions, such as bicycling on snow and ice and in the dark (van der Plas and Kelly 1998).

Innovation by users tends to be widely distributed rather than concentrated among just a very few very innovative users. As a result, it is important for user-innovators to find ways to combine and leverage their efforts. Users

increase the ease with which innovators can build larger systems from interlinkable modules created by community participants. Free and open source software projects are a relatively well-developed and very successful form of Internet-based innovation community. However, innovation communities are by no means restricted to software or even to

The collective or community effort to provide a public good-which is what freely revealed innovations are-has traditionally been explored in the literature on "collective action." However, behaviors seen in extant innovation communities

inventory-management systems, such as retailers, tend to be the developers of new approaches to inventory management. In contrast, manufacturers of inventory-management systems and equipment tend to develop improvements to the

The whole sport of high-performance windsurfing really started from that. As soon as I did it, there were about ten of us who sailed all the time together and within one or two days there were various boards out there that had footstraps of various kinds on them, and we were all going fast and jumping waves and stuff. It just kind of snowballed from there. (Shah 2000) By 1998, more than a million people were engaged

1 Introduction and Overview When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services-both firms and individual consumers-are increasingly

Why does a user wanting a custom product sometimes innovate for itself rather than buying from a manufacturer of custom products? There is, after all, a choice-at least it would seem so. However, if a user with the resources and willingness to pay

begin this chapter by reviewing the evidence that many users indeed do develop and modify products for their own use in many fields. I then show that innovation is concentrated among lead users, and that lead users' innovations often become commercial products.

The evidence on user innovation frequency and pervasiveness is summarized in table 2.1. We see here that the frequency with which user firms and individual consumers develop or modify products for their own use range from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent in fields studied to date.

frequency with which user firms and individual consumers develop or

this chapter by reviewing the evidence that many users indeed do develop and modify products for their own use

informal user group. High-performance windsurfing involves acrobatics such as jumps and

its core a problem-solving process. Research into the nature of problem solving shows it to consist of trial and error, directed by some amount

It is becoming progressively easier for many users to get precisely what they want by designing it for themselves.

error information" that they gained. (In the trial-and-error formulation of the learning process, error is the new information or learning derived from an experiment by an experimenter: it is the aspect(s) of the outcome that the experimenter did not predict.) Developers then use the new learning to modify and improve the solution under development before building and running a new trial (figure 5.1).

the ongoing shift of product-development activities from manufacturers to users is painful and difficult for many manufacturers.

different products or innovations. For example, Boeing is a manufacturer of airplanes, but it is also a user of machine tools. If we were examining innovations developed by

for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual