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?”