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| Passing Innovation Downstream |
Rajiv Ramaratnam
07/15/2014
and in PDF format at http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ.htm
Long before the term’ Crowdsourcing’ was created, long before James Surowiecki authored the book ‘Wisdom of Crowds, one professor at MIT, Eric von Hipple introduced his theory of Democratizing Innovation, a thought that would inspire today’s realities like open source programming and open up fresh pathways for innovation.
I was one of the fortunate ones to take his course ‘Innovation in the Marketplace’, during my student days at MIT in 2006. It was here that I heard von Hipple’s famous theory on innovation:
“Once a product is created, its innovation will not come from the ones who create it but from its users.â€
To describe his theory, von Hipple created the term ‘Lead user’ to describe the innovative user. In class, von Hipple presented us a video to show how innovation happens, when there is absolute freedom. The video was about a dry summer in California when there was no rain.
With the scorching heat of that summer, swimming pools of varying sizes and shapes, at homes and public places stood barren and desolate. But only for a short while. A group of innovative skateboarder found a new use for them. The pools became skateboard rinks for the skateboarder. The variation of the shape of some of these pools posed a new challenge to these new innovators.
To solidify his theory further, von Hipple posed this question to the class, “How many of you have customized your backpacks?†and smiled, unsurprised with the numerous hands that went up.
Yet another example he mentioned was the story of Lego Mindstroms, the kit from Lego toys to build robots. These kits, produced from a a joint collaboration between Lego and MIT, were originally created and targeted for high school students.
To the surprise of Lego’s marketing department, most of the customers of the Mindstorms kits came from the hacker community , most of whose members were older than the average high school students. Soon the hackers bypassed the software which came with these kits and created their own languages, to program the robots they created.
Lego Corporation was obviously shocked with this turn of events. After two years of silence on the matter, the company announced the next version of the kits. This time they invited the very hackers who had customized the kits to solicit their ideas.
XBMC is my favorite example of user innovation. Initially created by the hacking community as a media center for the Xbox, it was seen as a way to play media files from any computers within a house on a TV by wirelessly streaming them through the Xbox. XBMC was built and distributed for free by a hacking community.
That was more than five years ago. Today XBMC media players are supported for all computing platforms, Windows, Mac or Linux and are arguably the best media centers bar none. No other media center, commercial or free comes close to XBMC in features or extensions. In addition to streaming functionality, XBMC media centers allow playing of videos and music from most popular web sites. XBMC is still free and an open source software.
The story of the Linux operating system is another story of user innovation. Linus Torwald, Finnish American software professional created Linux as a free operating system. Today, thanks to the generous support of large companies like IBM, a multitude of Linux distributions exist in the market today. Most of them like Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSuse are free and will stay free for the foreseeable future. It is estimated that most servers on earth and almost all of the supercomputers in use today use Linux Operating systems.
Open source software, created and distributed by the open source communities have gained popularity both among individual users and large corporations and pose threats to their commercial counterparts.
Soliciting ideas from the crowd is not just limited to software. Timothy Ferris, the author of several bestsellers, often ‘crowd-sources’ the titles for his books. Billionaire Mark Cuban used ideas solicited from fans of his football team, the Mavericks. The Mavericks under Cuban went on to win a championship in 2011.
There is one event in the news that needs special mention here. Ikea, the do-it-yourself furniture company that sells furniture in ‘kit’ form, apparently does not buy into von Hipple’s theory of promoting innovation. The site IkeaHacker.net is a popular site that showcases ‘hacks’ made by some creative individuals to Ikea furniture. A few weeks ago, Ikea sent out a legal notice to this site to cease and desist.
Personally, I do not agree with Ikea’s decision and believe that it may cost Ikea the loss of many innovative lead users. Time will tell how this decision will work for Ikea. However, Democratizing Innovation may not be the right strategy for all corporations. For instance, Apple, a company that is known for its innovation is not known to pass down innovation to users unequivocally.
Anyone may build applications for an iPad or an iPhone and place them in Apple’s digital store as long as you do not compete with Apple’s own products. This strategy has worked well for apple and has payed them rich rewards, for decades now.
In conclusion, companies must carefully evaluate the level and extent of ‘demoractizing’ its product, service or technology based on what their payoffs would be. And finally, Eric von Hipple’s book, ‘Democratizing Innovation’ in the spirit of his theory, is a free download available on Kindle at:
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