The Sources of Innovation

What Hacker News says

1. mindcrimeMay 2015
   The Law - Frédéric Bastiat. http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html

   Capitalism - A Treatise on Economics - George Reisman. http://www.capitalism.net/Capitalism/CAPITALISM_Internet.pdf

   The Works of Lysander Spooner. http://lysanderspooner.org/node/2

   The Machinery of Freedom David Friedman. - http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

   Democratizing Innovation - Eric Von Hippel. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm

   The Sources of Innovation - Eric Von Hippel. http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/sources.htm

   Introduction to Information Retrieval - http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/html/htmledition/irbook.html

   Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms - David MacKay. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.html

   Introduction to Cybernetics - William Ross Ashby. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf

   "Man-Computer Symbiosis" and "The Computer As A Communication Device" - J.C.R. Licklider. http://memex.org/licklider.pdf

   Design For A Brain - William Ross Ashby. https://archive.org/details/designforbrainor00ashb

   The Writings of Douglas Engelbart. http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html

   and if you like maths, don't miss this great list of free maths texts by George Cain: https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.h...

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2. mgummeltApr 2018
   The Sources of Innovation by von Hippel [1] tries to answer this question of when innovation comes from users vs. manufacturers vs. suppliers. The book is nearly unreadable, but the topic is interesting.

   [1] http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www-old/books/sources/SofI.pdf

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3. dejanJun 2009
   Well, I like the tone of this post also much better :) Yes I am the poster, I got the insults there previously a bit personal :)

   I agree with you that it is a sociological problem being tackled here. Indeed, if we succeed in this it will be a great social innovation. I am far from seeing it easy and obvious, but a bumpy ride we're all going to learn from. As I see now, we'll either become a full fledged channel for embedding constructive feedback to companies, or a new recruiting place with a different, proactive method.

   However, I am not the one inventing this thing up just to prove something to companies. My statements are based on Eric Von Hippel's work from the 80s: "The Sources of Innovation" and "Democratizing Innovation" - The Lead User Theory. And you need to see that this is not something new, as many are already doing it. The only thing is - they have to ask for it - explicitly like Dell and Starbucks, implicitly like Lego and Harley Davidson. What we suggest is something to enrich it a bit more - self initiated input, whether it is a current user or not. Moreover, we are giving back for the input, they aren't, while they still get the input? People want to contribute, Open Source, wikis, this discussion we are having here (thank you).

   You are right that most people do not want to participate and as you say out of those that have ideas most lack the willingness to act. We are trying to make them share, and maybe when others see they'll change their mind? I don't know, that is truly brave thing to ask, so lets see where it goes?

   The target audience are young people and students, who are given incentives and awards for it. I guess for money and recommendations as well visibilities, students "want to be inventors, journalists and musicians." If it helps them get closer to companies, why not? I truly believe that student ideas should be seen by companies, and others.

   Also, we are not founded as a company yet, and maybe we'll take the route of a non-profit. Call this a big experiment, we'll all learn something from it.

   I do not expect anyone to agree with me on the blog post, those are truly personal beliefs. I didn't attack anyone in particular but processes, so I don't see a reason for any revolt from anyone.

   Thank you for these insights, and regarding #3 I will rewrite the tone later so I don't get my head chopped off, served something else rather than coffee in a bar, or hit by a bus :))

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