Eric von Hippel

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. von Hippel's work has applications in business strategy and free/open source software (FLOSS) and von Hippel is one of the most highly cited social scientist writing on FLOSS.

Eric von Hippel is the son of the material scientist and physicist Arthur Robert von Hippel who was also a professor at MIT. His great uncle is the German ophthalmologist Eugen von Hippel.

Degrees

• Copenhagen Business School Ph.D. 2007 (Hon)
• Ludwig-Maximillians Universität München Ph.D. 2004 (Hon)
• Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. 1974
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology S.M. 1966
• Harvard College B.A. 1964

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

See also

• User innovation
• Lead user
• Toolkit for User Innovation and Design
• Private-Collective Model of Innovation

External links

• UserInnovation.dk The largest resource center for user innovation
• Eric von Hippel's homepage at MIT.
• Available research papers.
• OpenInnovators.de - die erste Commnunity zu Open Innovation im deutschsprachigen Raum.
• The Economics of Open Content Symposium: New Models of Creative Production in the Digital Age Collaboration and the Marketplace
• Openeur - Open Innovation & Entrepreneurship - MCPC2007-Keynote by Eric von Hippel at MIT

Wikiversity has learning materials about Eric Von Hippel:Democratizing Innovation

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