Democratizing Innovation on the Mobile Platform
Eric von Hippel, Professor and Head of the Innovation and EntrepreneurshipGroup at the MIT Sloan School of Management, discusses in his book
([von Hippel 2005]) the phenomenon that users can generate innovation
if a toolkit – based on a platform product – is provided, that allows them
to create user-developed modifications that suit their own needs. He calls
this ‘distributed innovation’ by ‘lead users’. Lead users have the following
characteristics:
• They are ahead of most users in their population with respect to an
important market trend and so are experiencing needs today that will
later be experienced by many other users.
• They know and understand their own needs well.
• They are close to ‘real situations’, so the products they develop will
appeal to others too.
• They may innovate if they want something that is not available on the
market.
Although his empirical data is collected from other fields, his arguments
around his lead-user theory matches well with what we practically
experience from outcomes of workshops with creative students learning
