Innovation Moves From the Laboratory to the Bike Trail and the Kitchen
By VIRGINIA POSTREL
Published: April 21, 2005
WHEN most people think about where new or improved products come from,
they
imagine two kinds of innovators: either engineers and marketers in big
companies trying to "find a need and fill it" or garage entrepreneurs
hoping to strike it rich by inventing the next big thing.
But a lot of significant innovations do not come from people trying to
figure out what customers may want. They come from the users themselves,
who know exactly what they want but cannot get it in existing products.
"A growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to
develop many, and perhaps most, new industrial and consumer
products," Eric von Hippel, head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Group at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, wrote in "Democratizing Innovation," recently published by MIT
Press. (The book can be downloaded at Professor von Hippel's Web site,
http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/ .)
Innovation by users is not new, but it is growing. Thanks to low-cost
computer-based design products, innovators do not have to work in a
professional organization to have access to high-quality tools. Even home
sewing machines have all sorts of computerized abilities. And once a new
design is in digital form, the Internet allows users to share their ideas
easily.
Because users are often quite different from each other, their innovation,
by definition, accommodates variety. A survey of users of Apache Web
server software found that different sites had different security
needs: one size definitely did not fit all. Nineteen percent of the users
surveyed had written new code to tailor the software to their specific
purposes.
"Users are designing exactly what they want for themselves; they have only
a market of one to serve," Professor von Hippel said in an
interview. "Manufacturers are trying to fit their existing investments and
existing solution types to the largest market possible."
Open-source software like Apache or Linux is an obvious example of users
developing and sharing innovations, but it is not the only one. Many of
the book's examples come from extreme sports like kite surfing and
snowboarding, where enthusiasts often invent their own equipment. Mountain
biking, Professor von Hippel noted, grew to about half a million
participants before manufacturers started to make bicycles suited for wild
rides on rough terrain.
Mountain bikers ride on different terrains and in different weather
conditions, and they do different sorts of tricks. They also come from
varied professional backgrounds, from orthopedic surgery to aerospace
engineering, giving them different skills to draw on.
Not surprisingly, bikers have come up with a wide range of
innovations. One biker developed his own armor and protective
clothing. Another invented a way to carry his bike on steep mountains and
dangle it over cliffs. Yet another added metal studs to his tires for
biking on ice.
In order for companies to generate new ideas, Professor von Hippel urges
them to pay more attention to "lead users" like these biking
enthusiasts: people who stretch the limits of a technology and create
their own innovative prototypes.
In a study at 3M, he and several colleagues found that product ideas from
lead users generated eight times the sales of ideas generated internally -
$146 million versus $18 million a year - in part because lead users were
more likely to come up with ideas for entire new product lines rather than
minor improvements.
The definition of "lead users" can become a bit circular, identifying
anyone who innovates as a "lead user." But in some fields, it is not hard
to spot the people whose need to lower costs or enhance performance is
particularly great.
"The Disney animators or Pixar animators are ahead on video editing tools
from the ordinary consumer," Professor von Hippel said. "Yet we know the
stuff that these guys develop now ends up migrating downstream to the
general people over time."
To get people exactly what they want, user innovation suggests an
alternative to mass customization, the manufacturing process that seeks to
tailor products to specific users while maintaining the economies of
large-scale production. Mass customization generally entails mixing and
matching pre-specified components, which significantly limits its
flexibility.
When you order a Dell computer, for instance, "you can slot in any disk
drive you want, but it's still a disk drive," Professor von Hippel
said. Truly flexible manufacturing technologies, he suggested, would work
more like photocopiers, which do not limit what sort of images they can
reproduce.
The model is custom semiconductor design and manufacturing.