MIT Sloan Management Review

What if what you know about the innovation process is wrong? That’s a question Eric von Hippel thinks companies should consider.

Von Hippel, professor of technological innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has spent much of his career doing research that has led him to a radical conclusion: The traditional view of the product innovation process is flawed. In the traditional view, companies get too much credit for product innovation, according to von Hippel — and users get too little.

Traditionally, we have tended to think of businesses (or individuals who then start businesses) as the principal source of innovative new products or services in a market economy.  But, in a thought-provoking new working paper, Carliss Y.

Eric von Hippel of the MIT Sloan School has long argued that users play a larger role in product development than is commonly believed. Now, in a new working paper, Pedro Oliveira and von Hippel take a look at customers' role in innovation in a service industry: banking.

A new working paper examines the prevalence — and policy implications — of innovations that come from technology users.