You Can Innovate: User Innovation & Entrepreneurship
You Can Innovate.
Course Information
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About this Course
You Can Innovate prepares you for the MIT Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp!
The Bootcamp is a one-week, intensive entrepreneurship education program that challenges you to start a company in 5 days. The Bootcamp offers you the unique opportunity to be mentored by MIT faculty and MIT alumni entrepreneurs and investors as you begin your new entrepreneurial journey.
But some of you may not plan to attend the Bootcamp. This is OK. You Can Innovate is just right for you if you’re looking for an idea.
You know, we’ll let you in on a secret. Innovation isn’t confined inside the walls of research labs swarming with PhDs. More often than not, innovation is about ordinary people solving problems that matter to them personally. This could be you.
Examples of user innovation are infinite. A surfer created the GoPro to take “selfies” while surfing. A student came up with Dropbox after forgetting his flash drive. Two broke entrepreneurs rented out their living room to help pay rent, and Airbnb was born. They’ll share their paths to startup success.
Taught by Eric von Hippel, the founding scholar of user innovation, this course will help you think about what problems you should choose to solve and how to share your innovations with others.
This course is terrific for:
- Aspiring entrepreneurs searching for ideas for innovation;
- Inveterate inventors searching for ways to diffuse their innovations;
- Entrepreneurship educators looking for practical methods for meaningful ideation.
You Can Innovate has also been valuable for policymakers who work to energize the innovation ecosystems in their regions and for innovators within established companies working to anticipate or, better, productively engage with disruptive innovations.
In the Verified track, the MIT course team composed of Faculty, Teaching Fellows, and Alumni Mentors will review, grade and provide feedback on your assignments. In the Verified track you will also be enrolled in weekly review and discussion sessions.
You can innovate.
What you'll learn
- Understand the phenomena of, and distinctions between, user and producer innovation
- Understand the phenomenon of the “co-forming of need and the solution”
- Understand concepts such as sticky information and low-cost innovation niche
- Understand the the role of the principal/agent problem in innovation
- Understand key pathways for innovation diffusion
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.
