Eric Von Hippel - Major Works

Major Works

INNOVATION BY USERS AND LEAD USERS

User innovation is the idea that more users and consumers are the innovators of new products instead of suppliers. Eric von Hippel was one of the first to notice this trend and explore it. Products made by manufacturers are developed to meet a wide range of needs and a wide range of people. Therefore when a particular user experiences needs that are not yet felt by the majority of consumers, they make the adjustments themselves to meet their own needs. Often these ideas are then fed back to manufacturing companies through these users in hopes that the product will then be produced for them. This process is called free revealing. User innovation can be seen across a wide range of products from home cleaning products, to medical device products. User innovation in scientific instruments has even been found to be a user dominated field through von Hippel's research. User innovation doesn't only extend to tangible products but also services. Von Hippel found that eighty-five percent of individuals self-provided themselves with accounting and banking processes before banks offered this service.

An extension of user innovations is the idea of lead users. These are the individuals who first feel the need for a product or service and create it for themselves. Lead user identification is an essential method used by companies to identify the newest innovations in their product areas giving them crucial insight on the needs of their users.

STICKY INFORMATION AND ITS USES

Sticky information is information that is expensive to obtain, transmit, and employ in a new location compared to where it originated. "We define the stickiness of a given unit of information in a given instance as the incremental expenditure required to transfer that unit of information to a specified locus in a form usable by a given information seeker. When this cost is low, information stickiness is low; when it is high, stickiness is high," (von Hippel, 1994). Eric von Hippel has worked to define how sticky information influences innovation and how to overcome stickiness when trying to develop a new technology. Sticky information is often encountered when a manufacturers would like to know about how current users feel about their needs and if their needs are being met or not by current product lines. However this information would be difficult to acquire for the manufacturer, though it would be tremendously helpful in their pursuit of product innovation.

Information can be sticky for a number of reasons. Much information that humans have is tacit, and therefore is difficult to communicate when sharing information. Additionally, some technical information is composed of a very large number of parts. Sometimes it is difficult to communicate all of these especially when some operating procedures or techniques are so routine, a regular practitioner may forget to include such details.

The stickiness of a particular type of information can have influences on how advances are made in the field. For example, if a particular company holds much of the expertise and knowledge for a particular technology it will likely be difficult for another company to make advancements that originate from the original technology. Innovations are more likely to occur in the original company. This can also occur in a geographic manner. Local information can also be sticky and innovations that help a particular area with a special problem are likely to come from that area as well.

INNOVATION TOOLKITS

On Professor Von Hippel's website, it is stated that innovation toolkits are used to organize and support information that is shared amongst various users and producers of projects. In one of his papers entitled "Perspective: User toolkits for innovation," Von Hippel describes how user toolkits can be used to help manufacturers and companies determine the users' need-related aspects of products and services. The users are provided with "user toolkits for innovation," to help the manufacturer outsource tasks that would normally take much time and effort within the company. One of the first areas that user toolkits have been used was in the design and manufacturing of custom integrated circuits. In this field it was critical that manufacturers understood user needs because it could result in months of delays costing the company thousands of dollars. LSI Logic produced a software design tool that its customers could use to design circuits themselves. This move helped LSI grow to be one of the major players in the custom IC market and competitors were soon moving in the same direction.

"Toolkits for user innovation are coordinated sets of "user-friendly" design tools that enable users to develop new product innovations for themselves. The toolkits are not general purpose. Rather, they are specific to the design challenges of a specific field or sub field, such as integrated circuit design or software product design."

MEASUREMENTS OF INNOVATION / INNOVATION INDICATORS

Researchers have not started quantifying user innovation until recently. It is important that researchers are able to measure innovation and gather statistics so that policymakers can see the impact of user innovation on modern day technologies. Research has shown that many of the innovative products produced by manufacturers were ideas stemmed off from "lead users." Eric Von Hippel has written several papers regarding "Measurements of Innovation" and "Innovation Indicators." In one of his papers, he discusses his work with Fred Gault to survey 1,219 Canadian manufacturing plants to determine the prevalence of user innovation. They were able to determine that "About 20% of the user-innovators surveyed reported transferring their innovations to other users and/or equipment suppliers – and the majority of these at least sometimes did so at no charge to recipients." These types of innovation indicators will help the government and other researchers to see the impact of users on innovation.

METHODS

INNOVATION STRATEGIES AND LEAD USER IDENTIFICATION

Eric Von Hippel has focused on the following major areas of innovation strategies in his research:

• Task partitioning

• Improvement of innovation processes

• Pyramiding

Task partitioning refers to innovation projects that are partitioned into smaller tasks. Professor Von Hippel proposes that "problem-solving inter-dependence among tasks can be predicted in many projects and can then be managed by strategies involving (1) adjustment of the task specifications and/or (2) reduction of the barriers to problem-solving interaction across selected or all task boundaries."

Professor Von Hippel calls attention to the improvement of innovation processes with great detail. He feels that the processes call for more scrutiny and that in turn "their improvement can significantly affect the kinds of research problems that can be addressed, the efficiency and speed with which R&D can be performed, and the competitive positions of firms employing them."

Through his papers, Eric Von Hippel deems it critical for market researchers to look for lead users, "users who are on the leading edge of each identified trend in terms of related new product and process and who expect to obtain a relatively high net benefit from solutions to those needs." Pyramiding is a search process based upon the view that people with a strong interest in a topic or field tend to know people more expert than themselves. Von Hippel states that it can sometimes be hard to identify lead users or the next CEO of any given company and pyramiding can assist in this process.

• The Sources of Innovation (1988) ISBN 0-19-509422-0, Oxford University Press PDF
• Democratizing Innovation (2005) ISBN 0-262-22074-1, Creative Commons PDF