How to Develop Breakthrough Products and Services

When users join together to work on a common interest – ranging from open source software projects to kitesurfing – they can carry out large scale innovation projects of great interest to both users and producers. This video explains with examples.

Producers can help their customers innovate – and gain commercially valuable ideas as a result, by providing customers with toolkits for user innovation. This video explains what such toolkits are, and how they work.

Producers can benefit from commercializing user-developed innovations – but they must learn to identify those “lead users” who develop the most valuable ones. This video explains methods by which firms can identify and learn from lead users.

In this video Prof. von Hippel explains the ongoing paradigm shift from producer to user innovation. He describes study findings, and explains why users - both individuals and firms - are increasingly developing new products and services for themselves.