Eric von Hippel > Quotes

“high-performance windsurfing techniques and equipment in Hawaii by an informal user group. High-performance windsurfing involves acrobatics such as jumps and flips and turns in mid-air. Larry Stanley, a pioneer in high-performance windsurfing, described the development of a major innovation in technique and equipment”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“1978 Jurgen Honscheid came over from West Germany for the first Hawaiian World Cup and discovered jumping, which was new to him, although Mike Horgan and I were jumping in 1974 and 1975. There was a new enthusiasm for jumping and we were all trying to outdo each other by jumping higher and higher. The problem was that ... the riders flew off in mid-air because there was no way to keep the board with you-and”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“hard to create. One will very likely
be rejected with the rebuke that one should not spoil the fun! Pleasure as a motivator can apply to the development of commercially”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Trial-and-error experimentation can be informal or formal; the underlying principles are the same. As an example on the informal side, consider a user experiencing a need and then developing what eventually turns out to be a new product: the skateboard. In phase 1 of the cycle, the user combines need and solution information into a product idea: “I am bored with roller skating. How can I get down this hill in a more exciting way? Maybe it would be fun to put my skates’ wheels under a board and ride down on that.” In phase 2, the user builds a prototype by taking his skates apart and hammering the wheels onto the underside of a board. In phase 3, he runs the experiment by climbing onto the board and heading down the hill. In phase 4, he picks himself up from an inaugural crash and thinks about the error information he has gained: “It is harder to stay on this thing than I thought. What went wrong, and how can I improve things before my next run down the hill?”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Perhaps you can change the wallpaper, but you are less likely to change Uncle Bill, your kids, your established tastes with respect to a living environment, or your resource constraints.”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“the Sources of Innovation: The Case of Scientific Instruments." Research Policy 23, no. 4: 459-469.”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Then I remembered the "Chip," a small experimental board we had built with footstraps, and thought "it's dumb not to use this for jumping." That's when I first started jumping with footstraps and discovering controlled flight. I could go so much faster”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“example, developed the World Wide Web as a lead user working at CERN. The World Wide Web was certainly”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services-both firms and individual consumers-are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“have been found to be highly correlated”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Morrison, Roberts, and I obtained responses from 102 Australian libraries that were users of OPACs. We found that 26 percent of these had in fact modified their OPAC hardware or software far beyond the user-adjustment capabilities”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Research provides a firm grounding for these empirical findings. The two defining characteristics of lead users and the likelihood that they will develop new or modified products have been found to be”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Chapter 4 concludes by pointing out that an additional incentive can drive individual user-innovators to innovate rather than buy: they may value the process of innovating because of the enjoyment or learning that it brings them. It might seem strange that user-innovators can enjoy product development enough to want to do it themselves—after all, manufacturers pay their product developers to do such work! On the other hand, it is”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“high-performance windsurfing techniques and equipment in Hawaii by an informal user group. High-performance windsurfing involves acrobatics such as jumps and flips and turns in mid-air. Larry Stanley, a pioneer in high-performance windsurfing, described the development of a major innovation in technique and equipment to Sonali Shah:
In 1978 Jurgen Honscheid came over from West Germany for the first Hawaiian”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“unless they have direct use for the innovations—must sell the materials or services in order to profit from the innovations. The user and manufacturer”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“are at the leading edge of the market with respect to important market trends, one can guess that many of the novel products they develop for their own use”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Innovation user and innovation manufacturer are the two general "functional" relationships between innovator and innovation. Users are unique in that they alone benefit directly from innovations. All others (here lumped under the term "manufacturers") must sell innovation-related products or services”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“client and make something that they expect to be a more general solution instead.
The contrasting incentives of users and”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“When information is sticky, innovators tend to rely largely on information they already have in stock.”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“attractive qualities. It is becoming progressively easier for many users to get precisely what they want by designing it for themselves. And innovation by users appears to increase social welfare. At the same”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“than a million people were engaged in windsurfing, and a large fraction of the boards sold incorporated the user-developed innovations for the high-performance sport.”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“In this book I explain in detail how the emerging process of user-centric, democratized innovation works. I also explain how innovation by users provides a very necessary complement to and feedstock for manufacturer innovation. The ongoing shift of”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“enabling that transition was my close friend and colleague Dietmar Harhoff.”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Today, an open source software development project is typically initiated by an individual or a small group seeking a solution to an individual's or a firm's need. Raymond (1999, p. 32) suggests that "every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch" and that "too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the (open source) world...." A project's initiators also generally become the project's "owners" or "maintainers" who take on responsibility for project”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Research provides a firm grounding for these empirical findings. The two defining characteristics of lead users and the likelihood that they will develop new or modified products have been found to be highly correlated (Morrison et al.”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Exclusive rights to publish and sell this book in print form in English are licensed to The MIT Press. All other rights are reserved by the author. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142. Set in Stone sans and Stone serif by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hippel, Eric von. Democratizing innovation / Eric von Hippel.”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“Equivalents of the innovation resources described above have long been available within corporations to a few. Senior designers at firms have long been supplied with engineers and designers under their direct control, and with the resources needed to quickly construct and test prototype designs. The same is true in other fields, including automotive design and clothing
design: just think of the staffs of engineers and modelmakers supplied so that top auto designers can quickly realize and test their designs.”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“2003; Lakhani and Wolf 2005). Users’ Low-Cost Innovation Niches (Chapter 5) An exploration of the basic processes of product and service development show that users and manufacturers tend to develop different types of innovations. This is due in part to information asymmetries: users and manufacturers tend to know different things. Product developers need two types of information in order to succeed at their work: need and context-of-use information (generated by users) and generic solution information (often initially generated by manufacturers specializing in a particular type of solution). Bringing these two types of information together is not easy. Both need information and solution information are often very “sticky”—that is”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

“windsurfing, and a large fraction of the boards sold incorporated the user-developed innovations for the high-performance sport.
The user-centered innovation”
― Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation