Eric von Hippel

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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 open source software.

[edit] Major works

• The Sources of Innovation (1988) ISBN 0-19-509422-0, Oxford University Press PDF
• Democratizing Innovation (2005) ISBN 0-262-22074-1, Creative Commons PDF

[edit] See also

• Toolkit for User Innovation and Design

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Eric von Hippel

• Eric von Hippel's homepage at MIT.
• Available research papers.
• The Economics of Open Content Symposium: New Models of Creative Production in the Digital Age Collaboration and the Marketplace