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Tapping expert users takes innovation to new level
The course should be called ”Innovation,” but because it’s MIT the official title is
more technical: ”Generation of New Product and Service Concepts.”
By D.C. Denison, 3/17/2002 Boston Globe
It’s a core topic at MIT, whatever you call it, and it’s a safe bet that many of the 35
students enrolled this semester are surprised by professor Eric von Hippel’s message:
if you want to develop major new products, do not study average users.
Instead, von Hippel urges students to focus on ”lead users,” people who push the
limits of a product and can help companies discover ways to make improvements that
will ultimately appeal to everyday users.
”Lead users have a high incentive to make improvements,” von Hippel said in an
interview last week. ”They are ahead of the target market.”
Asked for an example, von Hippel cited a case on sailboards developed by his doctoral
student Sonali Shah. Originally designed for calm waters, sailboards were quickly
adopted by Hawaiian windsurfers who began taking the boards into heavy surf and
using them to perform somersaults. This required them to develop footstraps and other
innovations. The manufacturers who discovered this practice were able to launch
entirely new sailboards for the windsurfing market.
Von Hippel also cited the company that wanted to develop a nutritional product for
weekend athletes. They asked nutrition scientists who worked with Navy Seals and
Olympic athletes about the performance-enhancing food innovations they were using.
Automobile brake manufacturers looking for advances, he notes, studied racecars and
aerospace vehicles, which both have ”extreme” braking needs. Von Hippel was on a
roll.
”You want to see what kinds of things leading-edge users, whether individuals or
companies, are developing on their own,” said von Hippel. ”The inventions are out
there. The problem becomes search.”
And how do you find these lead users?
The method von Hippel has developed involves networking with people who are ”as
expert as you can find” and doing two things: talking to them about their needs and
their solutions; and asking them who knows more than they do.
”There’s always someone who’s more expert, and people in the field will help you get
to them,” von Hippel said. ”Also, as you move along, you will be changing the
questions to incorporate what you have learned.”
The result is that your questions get better as you climb the food chain to the most
advanced ”lead users.”
Von Hippel, who writes and consults about innovation (his Web site,
http://www.leaduser.com, describes some of his outside projects) believes the ”lead user”
idea liberates companies from the pressure to constantly create innovation.
”Tapping into lead users gives firms a systematic way of generating breakthroughs,” he
said. ”They no longer have to invent the solution on their own. They can incorporate
out-of-the-box innovations which have been developed by lead users, and already
proven under extreme field conditions.”
Eventually, companies will incorporate these cutting-edge users more tightly into their
development processes, von Hippel said. Already, recent advances in integrated chip
design, for example, allow an individual user to design the chip he wants and submit
that design to a chip company to be manufactured.
”As we get toward markets of one,” von Hippel said, ”manufacturers can no longer
afford to figure out what each user wants. Their best approach in that case is to
empower the user.”
Von Hippel has been developing ”toolkits” to enable just that: to give users more
control over the development of their own custom solutions and innovations.
”It’s kind of an evolving story,” von Hipple said. ”In the past, the approach was `find a
need and fill it.’ Finding lead users is an advance on that. But the future is even more
radical: `empower the user.”’
D.C. Denison can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].
This story ran on page C2 of the Boston Globe on 3/17/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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