PERSON
Eric von Hippel
The MIT economist who spent four decades proving that users—not manufacturers—are the primary source of innovation in many industries, and who lived to see artificial intelligence vindicate his framework more completely than any prior technology.
Eric von Hippel is the economist of the user. For most of the twentieth century, the profession assumed that innovation ran in one direction: from the corporation, with its research departments and patent portfolios, to the customer, who consumed what was offered. Von Hippel spent four decades demonstrating with data that this assumption was, for a large and consequential class of innovations, empirically false. The scientists who modified their own electron microscopes, the surgeons who bent their own retractors, the windsurfers who redesigned their own rigs—these were the actual sources of the innovations that manufacturers later commercialized. The explanation was not romantic but economic:
sticky information, the knowledge of one’s own needs that resists transfer to a manufacturer, combined with a cost-benefit
threshold that favored building over waiting. The framework named
lead users,
user innovation, and
free innovation as structural phenomena of any economy in which user needs are diverse and innovation costs are variable. Then the