Irving Wladawsky-Berger – IBM’s VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation (and one of the few “must-read” IBM employee blogs that I’m aware of) has a good post up summarizing Eric von Hippel’s work on Democratizing Innovation. Eric was my doctoral advisor at MIT (I didn’t finish) and has built 30 years of really important academic research (and a worldwide research community) on the idea he stated around 1978 that “innovation comes from users, not manufacturers.” Today we might say something like “yeah – uh huh”, but in 1978 this was a radical thought.
There was plenty of discussion about “users” and the importance of them – especially in the product development cycle – at Gnomedex last week. Wladawsky-Berger does a nice job condensing von Hippel’s ideas down into a few paragraphs. Eric’s latest book – Democratizing Innovation - is full of examples that build out his framework (and is available as a free PDF and licensed under a Creative Commons License.)
As a wise man once said to me when I was a young student, “wouldn’t manufacturers be irrelevant without users?”
Posted in: InnovationCOMMENTS (1)
Little girl gets legal letter from Apple not to send them product change suggestions
An eight year old sent Apple a list of product change suggestions for her iPod nano, like: '"slip a little chip" in there to add support for lyrics, movies,....she received a reply from Cupertino... signed by Apple's Senior Counsel, Mark Aaker, who put the little girl in her place by stating "please do not send" suggestions, and letting her know Apple doesn't accept unsolicited ideas."'
Talking about user backed innovation...
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