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 surfboard garages