Democratizing Innovation

Eric Von Hippel in his presentation begins with a comparison of the roles of innovation taken by manufacturers and users.  Manufacturers' innovate to benefit from selling where as users' innovate to benefit from using.  It is common for people to believe that it is dominant companies that are leading creation, development and innovation of products and services we consume, but in fact, Hippel's research showed that the contributions of users have been great toward the innovation of products.  One great quote in the presentation is that "necessity is the mother of invention."  In the presentation, users that innovate are described as having a specific need, reveal information freely, and collaborate in small communities. 

He gives several other examples of user contribution to the improvements of products.  One example was of a police force equipping their cars after the eruption of Mount St. Helens.  There was so much smoke and debris in the air, it was clogging air filters.  The police force instead of waiting for support, they did something about with what they had laying around.  They used tubing you would find on the back of a household dryer.  Another simple example was of one of his students, where their wife had been near giving birth to a child.  This student had altered his backpack to accomodate the charging of electronic devices so that he could charge via one plug.

Specialized needs are exercised on the edge of the market where to the user, it is low cost and to the manufacturer, there is uncertainty.  The result is that the user is empowered through innovation and the manufacturer is left trying to remain competitive.  An example is how three engineers at the company Lego had created a new robot that could be assembled just like other legos, but where it was different was how each component of assembly had a miniature cpu.  Once put together it could operate based on a written code.  Within three weeks of its' release, user communities had already hacked the code and innovated what functions the robot could perform.  Lego was left not knowing what to do, as if they were "a deer in the headlights."  

Knowledge management can help close the gap between manufacturers and users.  Manufacturers' have an abundance of capital but limited knowledge of user needs.  Users have very little capital but an abundance of ideas because they often times no what they want to great detail.  Creating a community of collaboration between both could help innovation thrive and as a result, we would have better products.