Where Do New Ideas Come From?
In chapter four of The Future and Its Enemies, I discuss MIT management professor Eric von Hippel's work on "sticky information"--knowledge that is difficult to transfer from one person (or group) to another. In developing new product ideas or improvements, one way to overcome the sticky-knowledge problem is to have users do their own innovations. That's the topic of Von Hippel's recent book Democratizing Innovation and of my new NYT column discussing it:
When most people think about where new or improved products come from, they imagine two kinds of innovators: either engineers and marketers in big companies trying to "find a need and fill it" or garage entrepreneurs hoping to strike it rich by inventing the next big thing.
But a lot of significant innovations do not come from people trying to figure out what customers may want. They come from the users themselves, who know exactly what they want but cannot get it in existing products.
"A growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many, and perhaps most, new industrial and consumer products," Eric von Hippel, head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in "Democratizing Innovation," recently published by MIT Press. (The book can be downloaded at Professor von Hippel's Web site, http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/.)
Innovation by users is not new, but it is growing. Thanks to low-cost computer-based design products, innovators do not have to work in a professional organization to have access to high-quality tools. Even home sewing machines have all sorts of computerized abilities. And once a new design is in digital form, the Internet allows users to share their ideas easily.
Because users are often quite different from each other, their innovation, by definition, accommodates variety. A survey of users of Apache Web server software found that different sites had different security needs: one size definitely did not fit all. Nineteen percent of the users surveyed had written new code to tailor the software to their specific purposes.
"Users are designing exactly what they want for themselves; they have only a market of one to serve," Professor von Hippel said in an interview. "Manufacturers are trying to fit their existing investments and existing solution types to the largest market possible."
Read the whole column here.