Product and Service Creation in the Internet Age
The way new products and services are developed is undergoing the biggest paradigm shift since the industrial revolution. This means real opportunities for entrepreneurial leaders like you. To take advantage of the opportunities, start by changing the way you think about innovation.
Course Information
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About this Course
Product and service development is rapidly shifting from the R&D departments of producers to innovating users themselves – that is, to potential customers. Producers must reorient themselves to find commercially-profitable designs among user prototypes, rather than exclusively relying on in-house development.
In this course, we will explore these new, internet age innovation processes. We will discuss how leaders can find, adopt, and profit from user-developed innovations in their own ventures and firms. We will also discuss the implications of the emerging “age of abundant and free innovation.”
What you'll learn
- Application of the Lead User Method to new product development
- Development of toolkits for DIY innovators
- Understanding of emerging innovation development methods
Prerequisites
None
Meet your instructors
Eric von Hippel
T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Management and a Professor of Management of Innovation and Engineering Systems, MIT Sloan School of Management
Professor Hippel's research discovers and explores patterns in the sources of innovation and develops new processes to improve the “fuzzy front end” of the innovation process—the end where ideas for breakthrough new products and services are developed. In his most recent book, Democratizing Innovation (MIT Press, April 2005), von Hippel shows how communities of users are actually becoming such powerful innovation engines that they are increasingly driving manufacturers out of product development altogether—a pattern he documents in fields ranging from open source software to sporting equipment. This discovery has been used for a better understanding of the innovation process and for the development of new innovation processes for industry. He is currently leading a major research project to discover how these user innovation communities work, and how and whether the same principles might extend to many areas of product and service development. In addition, von Hippel is working with governmental and academic colleagues in the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom to develop new and modified governmental policies appropriate to the newly emerging innovation paradigm of user-centered innovation.
