Great piece in The Feature about user-driven innovation, centered around an interview with Eric Von Hippel. MIT professor and author of Democratizing Innovation. I did a workshop with Eric's group a couple of years ago, and he's got a fascinating and well-researched POV. I learned a lot from the workshop, and enjoyed reading this artlcle. Here are some choice quotes.
Eric von Hippel's new book, Democratizing Innovation, documents how breakthrough innovations are developed by "lead users," -- users with a high incentive to solve problem, and that often develop solutions that the market will want in the future.Von Hippel argues that a user-centered innovation process -- one that harnesses lead users -- offers great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation model that has been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. To this end, he has developed a systematic model for companies to tap into the innovation potential of their lead user communities.
TheFeature: Why would mobile companies want to pay attention to lead users? After all, they already have in-house developers and targeted developer programs.
Von Hippel: First, let's be clear about lead users. These are highly motivated individuals, or even companies, who are on the cutting edge of technology use. They are not necessarily the people on the payroll or members of the development community, and this is a good thing because, while professional developers may have leading-edge technical skills, it's the lead users that have the leading-edge needs. This motivates them to look for and prototype solutions. As we know, necessity is the mother of invention.
Lead users therefore tend to develop functionally novel services -- services where the mobile vendor or service provider is likely to say, "Oh, I had no idea you even wanted to do that!" Just look at SMS: it's a lead-user innovation that caught the industry by surprise.
It pays to systematically identify and draw from lead-user innovation. The approach allows companies to draw upon a lot of new service prototyping and testing done by others, and for very little investment. A mobile games developer may hire over a hundred developers, but it can recruit thousands of lead users to develop on its proprietary platforms for free. Companies just have to do it right.
TheFeature: What do you mean by doing it right?
Von Hippel: I describe two methods in my book. The "lead user project method" is where companies tap into lead-user innovation; the "toolkit innovation project method" is about giving lead users the tools they need to tinker and innovate.
In both cases, the process used to find the lead users with the best ideas works a lot like tracking a hot news story. Like a journalist, the company has to ask the right questions of the right people, and network. The networking technique we have developed, which I call "pyramiding", is built on the fact that people who have a serious interest in a subject are likely to know others who are more expert than they are.
But don't design a Web questionnaire to identify lead users. A standardized survey won't provide enough information to tell you which people might be the actual lead users. You have to comb the Web for the publications, forums and thinking places where lead users might congregate, and you have to get out of your cubicle to meet them.
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Posted by: KERMIT WILLIAMS | October 03, 2005 at 12:41 PM