User Generated Innovation ...

Excerpts from an interview with Eric A. von Hippel - Head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management

It's a teaser in a way: "Democratizing Innovation."

Now, we have hundreds of thousands of different blogs that people follow, and little political-interest groups and different publications, and mass media is losing its appeal. And mass parties are losing their appeal. And mass publications are losing their appeal. So, we're going back to sort of the fragmented world,

... tools for high-quality innovation are getting so cheap and so ubiquitous that individuals can innovate for themselves at a steadily higher quality and at a steadily decreasing cost. Because of the Internet, it is also true that people can innovate collaboratively at a steadily lower cost.

... traditional assumptions about innovation and the best ways to innovate are upended. The basic idea is that it is the manufacturer's job to accurately understand your needs, and then make the perfect product for you. In fact, this is still the standard model of the innovation process taught in business schools today

Starting about 2000, user innovation related to the Internet, blogs, and open-source software began to become very visible. As a result, many people began to think, "Oh gosh, maybe the manufacturer-centered innovation model isn't the only way to go. Maybe innovation is really user-centered, and 'user-developed content' really does matter!"

Well, maybe you should start promoting compromise positions. For example, in clinical chemistry analyzers, some users are specifically authorized to modify the software. To avoid liability issues but also encourage innovation by users they say, "Well, these users can fiddle, but those can't." GE does the same thing with its MRIs. GE gives cheap MRI machines to people who they think are lead users who will evolve the software in valuable ways. And they lock down the systems of others to avoid liability.

the advice that I give my clients who have a lot of these Web 2.0 technologies is don't pick the right one for your users; give them an envelope to operate in, let them go try whatever they want and let them fail, and the best ones will emerge out of the broth.

Exactly. And notice what happens, because not only are the users innovating, but they're collaboratively filtering out the best ones. It may turn out manufacturers will learn to rely on users for innovation prototyping, and on the collaborative filtering efforts of user communities for a good piece of their marketing research.

User innovation doesn't necessarily reduce the amount of failures - it just takes them off your budgets.

Full Text: http://www.gartner.com/research/fellows/asset_172822_1176.jsp?WT.mc_id=News0808BI