Democratizing Innovation

By Eric von Hippel

Book Overview

Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users-both individuals and firms-often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all. The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products-most notably in the free and open-source software movement-but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive. Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses-the custom semiconductor industry is one example-that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262002744
• ISBN13: 9780262002745
• Release Date: August 1970
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Great ideas on innovation

This book is a great read, especially for someone who has not been taught about user innovation and who questions the open source business model. Von Hippel is a pioneer when it comes to user innovation. If you thought that companies come up with winning ideas, or that the only way to make any money on a great idea is to patent it then this book will open your eyes to a much greater world. The concepts of free revealing (vs. IP) and of lead user (vs. manufacturer) innovation are great. It goes deeping into the idea that information is sticky and cannot be communicated from users to engineers very easily, even in consumer focus groups. Also discussed is the opportunity to create a toolkit to allow users to do the development work for you. This book is truly outstanding.

Excellent and thought provoking read

Von Hippel has done an excellent job with this new work. I downloaded the pdf, read the first chapter and had to buy the book to read the remaining chapters. He has introduced many new subjects into the field of innovation and I'm sure this will be a book I will reference time and again. His writing style also made this an easy and enjoyable book to read at leisure. Well done.

State-of-the-art

The book comprises an outstanding publication in the field of innovation management. It has the potential of becoming the central textbook in the field of user-centered innovation which is an increasingly important research area. The objective of this book is to provide a state-of-the-art overview of research in the field of user innovation. Also, it aims to show how the different (so far more or less isolated) aspects are related. These are ambitious goals. From my perspective, the manuscript fully meets them. It offers a profound, concise and easy to read overview of the research done in the past decade. Its outstanding quality is that it manages to relate different aspects in an innovative way and shows the rationale of the research field. It delivers new insights even to a researcher active in this field for some years now. The book it interesting for a broad audience. It is stimulating even for a specialist in this field. But of course, the main audience is much broader. It should be of interest for scholars and students in the fields of innovation management, new product development, market research, economics and other. It will be of interest also for practitioners and policy makers in the corresponding areas. I really like the many easy-to-understand examples and its conciseness. One does not necessarily have to have an understanding of the research field before in order to learn from the book (and enjoy it!).

More than another open innovation book

This is a wonderful book beyond the typical managerial how-to-do checklists. This is the reason why I recommend this book especially to managers and practitioners (innovation management researchers will read the book anyway as Eric von Hippel is one of the leading scholars in this field). Managers may find the book, on a first glance, academic, full with tables, numbers and references. But von Hippel is driven throughout his book by the motivation to present not only a fascinating new idea, but to show that this idea is already a reality and that there is empirical evidence that his concepts provide value for companies and customers. This is the main difference to other books in the area which present various fuzzy weak signals but no proof. Von Hippel's book goes also beyond the open innovation idea of Chesbrough and others as mentioned by the first reviewer. Chesbrough names a lot of important actors in the innovation process, but neglects the - in my opinion - most important one: the customer or user of the innovation. Von Hippel starts exactly here. His approach is focused on the role of users and customers for the innovation process. In this regard, he builds on his earlier word of the 1970s and 1980s, but has a new story to tell: that user innovation is not only changing the corporate innovation process but also the nature of value creation: If manufacturing is outsourced to Asia, and users take over innovation (and perform this process superior to internal innovation processes), what is left for the corporation?

An insightful and practical view on the future of innovation

Democratizing Innovation covers a lot of new ground. It is important both for those responsible for generating innovations inside of companies and those researching how innovations occur. von Hippel's first book showed that in many cases users innovate ahead of firms. Democratizing Innovation goes much further and systematically presents a new framework for an entire user-centered innovation system. Many people are often puzzled by the success of open source software, wikipedia and other user-centric systems. This book explains why users innovate for themselves and why user innovation is rapidly increasing in importance. Von Hippel shows why users tend to freely share what they develop, why user-innovators tend to band together into communities, and why user-centered innovation is a really good thing from the point of view of both society and economy. Far from being overly academic ­this book gives very practical advice built onto a clear framework. It offers many concrete examples as to how firms can link to and benefit from product and service developments by users. It is a must read for CEOs­ not just junior staff!