Democratizing 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. ZeroGravitasSep 2013
   DEMOCRATIZING INNOVATION- by Eric Von Hippel talks about this and uses a few extreme sports (including the birth of mountain biking) as examples:

   http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm

   edit: Just checked and kitesurfing gets three mentions in the index and is the main non-software case study of chapter 7.

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3. jdp23Feb 2011
   Nonsense. User-led innovation can create breakthroughs, just read Democratizing Innovation.
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4. ZeroGravitasMay 2009
   Eric von Hippel's book "Democratizing Innovation" talks about this.

   The book is primarily about how end users more than ever are driving innovation, but he provides plenty of historical evidence of this being possible for a long time.

   There is a chapter that analyses the type of innovation that a user is likely to make versus the innovations a tool producer is likely to make. A user has the domain knowledge to realize that e.g. a tool with a particular shape might be necessary. A tool producer has the knowledge of metallurgy or tool production to realize that some new alloy might be a better fit for the type of stresses that this tool requires.

   He also notes that not all users will innovate, it will primarily be what he calls "lead users".

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_user

   The book is CC licenced and available for free download. It's got far more insight than this glib blog entry:

   http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm

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5. colortoneNov 2008
   I read non-fiction related to business strategy, sociology, economics, and technology constantly. In fact I went down the the LA public library and picked up 10 stellar titles just this weekend, I highly recommend all of these:

   - Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software [MIT] - Prisoner's Dilemma [William Poundstone] - Thinking Strategically [Nalebuff] - Co-opetition [Nalebuff] - Cluetrain Manifesto [Searls] - Open Sources 2.0 [O'Reilly] - Innovator's Dilemma [Christensen] - Net Worth [Hagel] - Democratizing Innovation [von Hippel] - Fooled by Randomness [Taleb]

   Other books I always keep around are "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" (a history of DJ's and electronic music), The Singularity is Near, and some Calvin and Hobbes ;-)

   All the reading is most definitely worth it, if you don't feel that way you're not reading the right stuff.

   The best book I've ever read is probably Anna Karenina (Magarshack translation, not the Oprah version, which is ironically much drier). Other very influential books on me include The Wealth of Networks, Shaping Things, and Free Culture. In fact, all 3 of those were given to me at different times in my life by the smartest person I know (a family friend of my parents)

   Maybe the key to the non-fiction reading is having an agenda. I always feel like I'm downloading knowledge that is going to help me make bank and/or help people so that keeps me riveted (beyond the intellectual stimulation, which I'm a total whore for, too ;-)

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6. ZeroGravitasJun 2010
   Some research I read recently suggested that it's not software that's the exception, it's chemical and pharmaceuticals (and even there it's not a clear win, nor is it based on high costs, but rather the specificity of patents in those fields creating clearly delineated property rights).

   In every other industry surveyed the patents may be felt necessary under current conditions but aren't considered useful in the sense you describe for rewarding innovation (e.g. defensive patents to stop others from blocking access to your own innovations).

   I believe the research was cited in Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation, ah here we are from, Chapter 6,

   " The real-world value of patent protection has been studied for more than 40 years. Various researchers have found that, with a few exceptions, inno- vators do not think that patents are very useful either for excluding imita- tors or for capturing royalties in most industries. (Fields generally cited as exceptions are pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and chemical processes, where patents do enable markets for technical information (Arora et al. 2001).) Most respondents also say that the availability of patent protection does not induce them to invest more in research and development than they would if patent protection did not exist."

   link to the full (and very good) book: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm

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