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March 26, 2007
User-driven innovation - part 1
Sunday's New York Times had an interesting piece by Michael Fitzgerald on user-driven innovation and the work of Erik von Hippel at MIT - How to Improve It? Ask Those Who Use It:
Mr. von Hippel is the leading advocate of the value of letting users of products modify them or improve them, because they may come up with changes that manufacturers never considered. He thinks that this could help companies develop products more quickly and inexpensively than with their internal design teams.
“It could drive manufacturers out of the design space,” Mr. von Hippel says.
It is a difficult idea for research and development departments to accept, but one of his studies found that 82 percent of new capabilities for scientific instruments like electron microscopes were developed by users.
As I have written earlier about bottom up innovation and Von Hippel's work, it raises some important ideas about our innovation system. Most of his ideas I agree with. However, I have to disagree with the though that user-driven innovation will "drive manufacturers out of the design space." If anything, it will do the opposite - as those companies without extensive design will be forced to seek out user-driven innovation and incorporate it into their products. A story in the Washington Post from a couple of years ago (Tapping Into Tinkering) pointed out how user modification of products is an established part of the US innovation system:
Fans of the TiVo digital video recorder have discovered how to break it open and install a larger hard drive. Early users of the Roomba, a robot vacuum cleaner, are rewiring it to serve as a "mobile security robot." Owners of the new Sony PlayStation Portable have figured out how to use the game machine to surf the Internet and exchange instant messages.
. . .
Sometimes, tinkerers become a consumer electronics maker's unofficial research-and-development team, with innovations winding up as built-in features down the line.
TiVo's most ardent fans came up with a way to record TV shows by sending commands via the Internet long before the company got around to officially offering that feature.
And before the iPod was the ubiquitous gadget it is today, early users of Apple's digital music player enabled it to store addresses and text files -- a feature the company now promotes.
Customers also came up with the idea of recording their own talk and music shows and making them downloadable for the iPod -- a phenomenon called "podcasting" that has become so popular that Apple recently rolled out software to streamline the process.
Americans have always liked to fiddle with things, from building better ham radios to juicing up car engines in the driveway. The urge fuels a multibillion-dollar industry in after-market auto parts, and automakers keep a close eye on how enthusiasts find new ways to use their products. Mitsubishi Motors, for example, sponsors teams that modify its Lancer Evolution performance car for auto shows.
Companies that let others seize that innovation are not going to survive. Or they will become simply contract manufacturers surviving in low wage locations. So the net effect will be an increase in design intensity of US firms.
And that would be a good thing.
(More tomorrow on a country that has embraced user-oriented innovation as a national policy).
Posted by Ken Jarboe at March 26, 2007 8:22 AM
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