Free Innovation | Eric Von Hippel | Design@Large
Design@Large for Spring 2017 Quarter
CSE 1202
Wednesdays 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM
ABSTRACT
Free innovation is a grassroots innovation process in which self-rewarded household sector innovators develop and give away valuable product innovations "for free." As an example, consider the father of a child with Type 1 diabetes who worried that he couldn't check his son's blood sugar levels when they were apart. A software engineer by profession, in his off-hours he "hacked" his son's continuous glucose monitor so its data uploaded onto the Internet. Another engineer with a diabetic child used his spare time to create a home-display system for glucose monitor data. The two fathers combined their systems and made the design information freely available to others.
In this lecture, Eric von Hippel starts by presenting survey findings showing that tens of millions of people spend tens of billions of dollars on product development for their personal purposes each year. The investment level is similar in scale to spending by companies to develop new products for consumers - but is entirely invisible to economics because the developments are given away for free. He then offers a way to understand this growing phenomenon in terms of a new "Free Innovation Paradigm." Free innovators are self-rewarded-by the benefits of their innovations, the intellectual stimulation involved in development, and the gratifications of altruism. Because they are self-rewarded, they can give away their innovations for free. Unlike producer innovators, free innovators can disregard the extent of the market, and so are often innovation pioneers. Free innovation poses a steadily stronger rival and complement to traditional producer innovation. He will conclude by discussing the very positive implications of Free Innovation for producers and for society at large.
SUPPLEMENTAL INFO
If you are interested, please read chapter one from Free Innovation prior to the talk. A free download of the paper is available at https://goo.gl/Mo5Fkr.
BIO
Eric von Hippel is the T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Management and a Professor of Management of Innovation and Engineering Systems at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research discovers and explores patterns in the sources of innovation and develops new processes to improve the "fuzzy front end" of the innovation process-the end where ideas for breakthrough new products and services are developed. In his most recent book, Democratizing Innovation (MIT Press, April 2005), von Hippel shows how communities of users are actually becoming such powerful innovation engines that they are increasingly driving manufacturers out of product development altogether-a pattern he documents in fields ranging from open source software to sporting equipment. This discovery has been used for a better understanding of the innovation process and for the development of new innovation processes for industry. He is currently leading a major research project to discover how these user innovation communities work, and how and whether the same principles might extend to many areas of product and service development. In addition, von Hippel is working with governmental and academic colleagues in the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom to develop new and modified governmental policies appropriate to the newly emerging innovation paradigm of user-centered innovation.