Eric von Hippel

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The builders were never who I thought they were.

I spent thirty years in the technology industry operating under an assumption so pervasive I mistook it for a law of nature: innovation flows from producers to consumers. Companies build. Users use. The interesting questions are about how to build faster, ship sooner, capture more of the market before a competitor does. The entire apparatus I inhabited — the product roadmaps, the sprint cycles, the feature prioritization meetings — was organized around the premise that creation is our job and adoption is theirs.

Then I read Eric von Hippel, and the premise collapsed.

Not because he argued against it philosophically. Because he counted. He went into laboratories and operating rooms and machine shops and