CONCEPT
Sticky Information
Von Hippel's concept for information that is costly to transfer from its point of origin — the cognitive, contextual, and embodied knowledge that resists extraction and transmission without significant loss of fidelity.
Sticky information is the structural mechanism that explains why user innovation persists even in markets where manufacturers have every incentive to innovate. The information necessary to design a product that precisely meets a user's needs resides with the user, not the manufacturer, and the cost of transferring that information is high because it lives in specific contexts — embodied experience, tacit knowledge, workflow adaptations — that resist codification. Users innovate not because they are more creative than manufacturers but because they possess information the manufacturer cannot cheaply acquire and because acting on that information directly is often cheaper than transferring it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The surgeon's knowledge of what is wrong with a particular instrument exemplifies stickiness. She has held the instrument inside a human body a thousand times. She knows, not from reading a specification but from accumulated memory of her hands, that the jaw angle is wrong by three degrees for her specific approach, that the ratchet