MIT Sloan Management Review

Michael Schrage of the MIT Center for Digital Business asks: “Who do you want your customers to become?” Your answer shows whether just how much authentic innovation you have to offer.

The current balkanized approach to measuring patent quality is not serving the users of the world’s patent systems.

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.

It has long been assumed that companies develop products for consumers, while consumers are passive recipients. However, this paradigm is flawed, because consumers are a major source of product innovations. This article suggests a new innovation paradigm, in which consumers and users play a central and active role in developing products. The article also summarizes key findings from studies on consumer product innovation conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan.

According to innovation expert Eric von Hippel, users are often the first source of new products — and that has important implications for businesses.

The conventional wisdom is that products that have a strong established base of users can often trump higher-quality alternatives. But recent research suggests otherwise.

Jack Dorsey’s Square aims to make it easier for offline merchants, “who still account for 94 percent of commerce in the world,” to take credit cards and to capture analytical data about their transactions.

Al Roth, expert in game theory, experimental economics, and market design (and Harvard Business School professor), is one of the big names in the field of matching markets — building efficient systems that match, for instance, new doctors to their first hospital jobs out of medical school.

The link between sustainability and innovation is commonly mentioned, but not commonly made. Here, new-product design guru Steven Eppinger describes the practice that breeds discovery.

There was lots of entepreneurial energy in the room at MIT's Kresge Auditorium today -- as a sizable crowd gathered in the morning for a free daylong "Startup Bootcamp" full of lessons from technology entrepreneurs.�

Andrew Lippman of the MIT Media Lab discusses the problems associated with trying to build products that will have appeal for a long time. The alternative? Build architectures that allow people to build their own products.

Two researchers consider a number of Apple’s innovations over the years — and conclude, among other things, that incremental technological innovations can sometimes have more influence than more radical ones.

The winning technology company at this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition had its roots in an experience that began with frustration.

We’re all familiar with the power of volunteer contributions in the open source software movement. Now companies are finding additional ways to work with volunteer contributors.

Mick McManus, CEO of a company called MAYA Design, offers some interesting reflections on the state of product innovation during the current downturn.

Executives, entrepreneurs and investors are too ready to believe that commodity is destiny. The result is a dulling of strategic focus and a narrowing of the business mind.

The benefits of knowledge management are often accepted as a given, but its role in producing specific desired outcomes is not well known. Recent research employs survey-based and qualitative analysis to determine the effectiveness of various knowledge management methods in driving and supporting new product development.&

A focus on design —which translates to a focus on customers’ true needs and unarticulated aspirations — ultimately creates better-informed, more nimble companies.

The next practices of innovation must shift the focus away from products and services and onto experience environments — supported by a network of companies and consumer communities — to co-create unique value for individual customers.

A three-step process to ensure that companies launch new products that make a profit and please customers.