Eric von Hippel

Eric von Hippel (born August 27, 1941) is an economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of new innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, he introduced the term lead user in 1986. His work has applications in business strategy and free/open source software.

Major works

* "The Sources of Innovation" (1988) ISBN 0-19-509422-0, [http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/sources.htm Oxford University Press PDF]
* "Democratizing Innovation" (2005) ISBN 0-262-22074-1, [http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm Creative Commons PDF]

ee also

*User innovation
*Lead user
*Toolkit for User Innovation and Design

External links

* [http://brugerinnovation.dk UserInnovation.dk The largest resource center for user innovation]
* [http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www Eric von Hippel's homepage at MIT] .
* [http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/papers.htm Available research papers] .
* [http://openinnovators.de OpenInnovators.de - die erste Commnunity zu Open Innovation im deutschsprachigen Raum] .
* [http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3015 The Economics of Open Content Symposium: New Models of Creative Production in the Digital Age Collaboration and the Marketplace]
* [http://www.openeur.com/blog/en/2007/11/13/mcpc2007-hippel/ Openeur - Open Innovation & Entrepreneurship] - MCPC2007-Keynote by Eric von Hippel at MIT