Democratizing Innovation,   ISBN:9780262720472

Customer Rating: 

Buy it for a course of the University, the content of the book is very interesting, it becomes trained the process to continue if you want to have innovative initiatives., although I don't recommend to buy it, unless you like to conserve the book in hard cory, you can get gratuitously in internet, since the author of the book allows to copy it for educational ends.

Customer Rating: 

As von Hippel pointed out in an article, the popularizer of "Open Innovation" focused on all the stakeholders in innovation except the most important: the users.

The customer or user has been von Hippel's focus since he coined the terms "customer-active paradigm" of innovation in the 70s; and "Lead Users", "sticky information", and "user toolkits" in the following decades. His early research focused on high-tech B2B firms, but Democratizing provides examples from B2C and C2C as well.

Recommended to anyone who wants to tap into the richest source of product innovation: the user.

Customer Rating: 

A rather academic approach on the subject leave the reading in some sections somehow difficult for those not use to technicalities of the researcher, but a very well written book overall. The book clearly identifies a path on the future trend on mass collaboration and how this will affect us in many ways. How our personal live and businesses will effected by this is already on the making, what we can do is to better understand it. This book does that.

I strongly suggest reading it for those interested in what the future will look like. The book pair off with
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Customer Rating: 

"Democratizing Innovation" means "innovating of oneself", for doing that one gets exactly what one wants, and not what manufacturers think the "average" user wants. The book claims that a key advantage of "democratizing innovation" is that the user is also the supplier. Uninhibited by legal barriers to entry like patents, user-innovators, unlike seller-innovators, are free to share their innovations with whoever they want.

Chapters 2-9 deal with different attractive aspects of user-innovations such as the fact that the output of innovation activities can be customized, or that user-innovations are cheaper than their seller-innovation counterparts. Revealed usefulness means that user-innovations spread faster than other innovations. They also meet the characteristics of public goods. As an example the book points to "free-open source software". Hence, the book argues for a public policy that supports user-innovation because it is "democratizing". Moreover, the increasing quality and quantity of computer software and hardware, and easy access to innovation tools and innovation commons points to future demand for user-innovations, a case made clear by the applications described in the last two chapters.

Given resource scarcity, a world without specialization and trade is hard to imagine,but this is a thought provoking book, nonetheless.

Amavilah, Author
Modeling Determinants of Income in Embedded Economies
ISBN: 1600210465

Customer Rating: 

A creative and provocative approach to business opportunities.
A stimulating quick read provoking unique stimulus to further creativity.You can't read this work without your own imagination kicking in.A brainstorming supplement.