Tuesday, September 14, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
Both innovation by individual users and open collaborative innovation is increasingly competing with and may displace producer innovation in many parts of the economy. This represents a paradigm shift with respect to innovation research, public policy related to innovation, and innovation practice. Eric will present the basic story and we will transition to a discussion of important implications and interesting research opportunities.
About Eric
Eric von Hippel is T Wilson Professor of Innovation Management, and also Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. Von Hippel is known for his research into the sources of and economics of innovation. He and his colleagues find that product development is rapidly shifting away from producers to users and to open user collaborations in the Internet Age – is being “democratized.” This shift in the locus of innovation requires responsive changes in company business models and government policymaking. For example, policy must be altered to support an information "commons" model of innovation rather than only model based upon proprietary intellectual property. Von Hippel’s book, Democratizing Innovation (2005) is available free on the web at http://mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm.