Where does most product innovation come from? You might look for it in the R&D units of consumer-product manufacturers, but you'd be better off checking the basement workshop of your next-door neighbor. In a survey conducted in the U.K. last year, MIT's Eric von Hippel and colleagues found evidence that that the amount of money consumers spent tweaking products dwarfed the R&D outlays by all British consumer-product firms combined. David Talbot, Technology Review's chief correspondent, recently asked von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at the Sloan School of Management, what lessons he gleaned from the survey on how companies can recognize and tap the power of user innovation.
TR: You surveyed 1,173 U.K. adults about their product-tinkering and inventive habits. What did you find?
Von Hippel: We found that 6.2 percent—representing 2.9 million people, or two orders of magnitude more than are employed as product developers in the U.K.—created or modified consumer products over the past three years and spent 2.3 billion pounds per year, more than double what the U.K. firms spent on consumer-product R&D.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Tapping the Innovative Masses - Technology Review
Author: David Talbot
