Innovation moves

Whether you’re a manufacturer or a marketer, sometimes it’s best to leave the innovation to your users. Or so proposes Prof Eric von Hippel at MIT and is reported in an article "Innovation moves from the laboratory…" in The New York Times by Virginia Postrel. Ms Postrel quotes Prof von Hippel from his book, Democratizing Innovation, “A growing body of empirical work shows that users are the first to develop many, and perhaps most, new industrial and consumer products.” Makes your job a lot easier, doesn’t it?