The Sources of Innovation [Paperback]

"An important and interesting book. Meeting customers' needs through successful innovation is an extremely difficult challenge. Von Hippel provides a powerful method for understanding customers' needs when the mass of potential users may not yet understand their own needs."--Sloan Management Review

"An important study."--Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek

"Each [of the book's two major studies] opens up new vistas on technical change, and for scholars interested in that topic this is must reading."--Journal of Economic Literature

"A path-breaking study."--Inc.

"This topic is important in modern business and industry, and the results of von Hippel's research could have wide-ranging implications for the way top management perceives the role of research and development....The book can be read by a broad audience--managers, graduate and undergraduate students, and thoughtful general readers."--Choice

"An important reference for future work on the characteristics of process innovation....Von Hippel's argument provides innovation managers with a powerful tool for identifying and addressing the nature of change that is needed within specific organizational structures."--RandD Management

"This book presents the results of pathbreaking research on two important topics. Von Hippel's research on the role of users in industrial invention, and, more generally, on the broader question of the locus of inventive activity in what the French call a filiere has changed the way that scholars of technological advance have looked at those questions. His more recent work, on technology sharing, has brought light to an aspect of technical change that scholars had not seen or understood before. This book will have a significant impact."--Richard R. Nelson, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

"This book should be of widespread use to academic scholars and industrial managers interested in the fundamental processes of industrial innovation in the modern economy."--Edwin Mansfield, Director, Center for Economics and Technology and Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

"Exciting new perspectives on the sources of innovation. The author's rich technological background and insight allow him to explain fundamental aspects of the innovation process that have been inaccessible to other researchers."--Anne P. Carter, Chair, Department of Economics, Brandeis University

"Von Hippel has made his study accessible to a wide variety of readers interested in better understanding the sources of innovation."--Technology and Culture

It has long been assumed that new product innovations are typically developed by product manufacturers, an assumption that has inevitably had a major impact on innovation-related research and activities ranging from how firms organize their research and development to how governments measure innovation. In this synthesis of his seminal research, von Hippel challenges that basic assumption and demonstrates that innovation occurs in different places in different industries. Presenting a series of studies showing that end-users, material suppliers, and others are the typical sources of innovation in some fields, von Hippel explores why this variation in the "functional" sources of innovation occurs and how it might be predicted. He also proposes and tests some implications of replacing a manufacturer-as-innovator assumption with a view of the innovation process as predictably distributed across users, manufacturers, and suppliers. Innovation, he argues, will take place where there is greatest economic benefit to the innovator.