埃里克·冯·希贝尔

Eric von Hippel (born August 27, 1941) is an American 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 in developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In 1986 he coined the term lead user to describe this phenomenon.

Eric von Hippel is the son of the Arthur Robert von Hippel, a material scientist and physicist who was also a professor at MIT. His mother was Dagmar Franck von Hippel, a daughter of James Franck, a German physicist who won the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics with Gustav Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom." His great-uncle is the German ophthalmologist Eugen von Hippel.

von Hippel has been awarded the EU Innovation Luminary Award (2015), the Schumpeter School Prize (2017), and the Portugal Medal of Science (2020). He is a member of the advisory board of Patient Innovation, a nonprofit, international, multilingual, free venue for patients and caregivers of any disease to share their innovations.

Early life

Eric von Hippel grew up in suburban Weston, MA with his parents, three brothers, and one sister. In his early years, Eric attended public school within the town, but then moved on to the Cambridge School of Weston – a private progressive school – for 8th grade, as well as his later years. Even as a young child, outside of the classroom, one of Eric's favorite pastimes was to try to create and invent new things. Much of his inspiration came from his father, Arthur Robert von Hippel, who was also a professor at MIT.

Education

For his undergraduate degree, Eric von Hippel attended Harvard College. In an interview with Eric, he stated that he chose Harvard over MIT for the opportunity to pursue Liberal Arts. His decision to major in Economics came after he explored courses in Biology and History, and found that neither was particularly the right fit for him. After pursuing several inventions post undergraduate, Eric returned to school for his master's degree in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. From there, he went on to start his own company, worked at management consultant McKinsey and Co., and eventually studied at Carnegie Mellon University for his Ph.D. in Innovation.

Degrees

University of Vaasa Ph.D. 2018 (Hon)

Hamburg University of Technology Ph.D. 2013 (Hon)

Copenhagen Business School Ph.D. 2007 (Hon)

LMU Munich Ph.D. 2004 (Hon)

Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. 1974

Massachusetts Institute of Technology S.M. 1966

Harvard College B.A. 1964

Major works

Von Hippel has published three books to date. All are published under Creative Commons licenses, and electronic copies can be obtained by anyone at no cost. These books are titled The Sources of Innovation (1988); (2) Democratizing Innovation (2005); and Free Innovation (2017).

Major topics covered in these books and also in many research articles follow.

Innovation by lead users

User innovation occurs when individuals or firms that actually use a product or service develop what they need for themselves. This is in contrast to producer innovation, where firms develop products for sale to users. Eric von Hippel was one of the first to explore this phenomenon in depth. He found that innovation by users differed from innovation by producers in a number of important ways. For example, products developed and sold by producers are typically intended to profitably serve the average needs of a wide range of people, and therefore may fit the needs of specific customers only approximately. In contrast, users develop or modify products to fit their own needs very precisely.

von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe innovating users with needs that are ahead of the general market. Lead users are a very important source of innovative progress because they often pioneer - acting earlier than producers to develop important new types of products and applications. Being innovation pioneers pays for lead users because they innovate only to serve their own needs. For this reason, they need not concern themselves with whether others will also want what they are developing for themselves. In contrast, producers must wait for evidence that there is a general and profitable market to be served before they can justify investing in a new type of innovation. For example, mountain bikes were developed by individuals who simply wanted to bike down mountains for fun, and so invented the sport of mountain biking for themselves. Bike producers stood by, simply watching and waiting for years until the extent of the market became clear. Finally, after the new sport had spread to hundreds of enthusiasts who participated by building their own "clunker" mountain bikes, producers finally entered the new market with the first commercial mountain bike products.

Studies of 1,678 innovations in nine industries find that lead users were the pioneering developers of 54.4% of those judged most important over time. User innovation activity appears to be present in all fields in which users have an interest, ranging from home cleaning equipment to medical devices. For example, a study of 500 patients with chronic diseases found that 8% of these individuals or their informal family caregivers had developed solutions that were both valuable to themselves, and novel to medical practice. Innovation development by users includes services as well as products. For example, in a study of the sources of important retail and commercial banking services, it was found that about half were first developed by users.

Lead user innovation also is prominently present in "low-tech" as well as more technologically sophisticated fields