“Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation”, edited by Dietmar Harhoff (Director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition) and Karim R. Lakhani (Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School), has now been published by MIT Press (https://mitpress.mit.edu).
The volume provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of the field of user and open innovation, reflecting advances in the field over the last several decades. The book is dedicated to the economist Eric von Hippel who, since the 1980s, pioneered a groundbreaking view of innovation. Von Hippel shows that in many cases users of products and services create innovations and that subsequently producers take up these innovations and develop them further. Thus he counters the dominant paradigm which casts profit-seeking firms as the main drivers of technological and organizational change. In their research projects, von Hippel and colleagues found empirical evidence that flatly contradicted the producer-centered model of innovation. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on user innovation, communities, and open innovation to solve important technological and organizational problems.
The contributors to the volume—including many colleagues of Eric von Hippel—offer both theoretical and empirical perspectives from such diverse fields as economics, the history of science and technology, law, management, and policy.
On 17 March 2016, 6:00 -8:00 p.m., Eric von Hippel himself will give a lecture about “Free Innovation and the Internet” at the new Munich Center for Internet Research (MCIR) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities addressing the question how the internet modifies innovation. The presentation followed by a discussion can also be watched via live stream (http://www.mcir.badw.de/). The viewers may ask questions via live chat. See also: http://www.ip.mpg.de/en/the-institute/events/free-innovation-and-the-internet.html.