CONCEPT
The Sources of Innovation (Framework)
Von Hippel's 1988 foundational mapping of where innovations actually originate — users, manufacturers, suppliers — and the structural conditions under which each source dominates in a given industry.
The Sources of Innovation framework provides the analytical architecture for predicting which actor in an industry's value chain will originate its innovations. The framework identifies three principal sources — users, manufacturers, and suppliers — and specifies the structural conditions under which each source dominates. The conditions are economic rather than cultural: the source of innovation in any industry is the actor who can capture the greatest share of the innovation's benefit relative to its cost. When users capture the benefit, users innovate. When manufacturers capture it, manufacturers innovate. When suppliers capture it, suppliers innovate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework emerged from von Hippel's effort to generalize the empirical findings from scientific instruments into a predictive theory. The 1988 book The Sources of Innovation presented the full framework with case studies demonstrating how it applied across diverse industries. The core prediction — that innovation sources are determined by the distribution of innovation benefits — made user innovation legible as a structural rather than
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