The Premise: The Lead User and the Machines That Build Machines

Eric von Hippel was my doctoral advisor at MIT. I didn’t finish the Ph.D. - I dropped out - but Eric stuck with me through all of it, more as a mentor than an academic. Around 1978, Eric said something that was radical at the time. “Innovation comes from users, not manufacturers.” Today that sounds obvious. You read it and think “yeah, uh huh.” In 1978 it was heresy. The entire model of how products got made assumed the manufacturer was the source of the idea and the user was the recipient. Eric spent the next 48 years building the academic foundation underneath the opposite claim, along with a worldwide research community to go with it. His Lead User work is the foundation for a wide body of research that came after. Lead users are the people who hit a need before the rest of the market does, and who build their own solution because nothing on the shelf does the job yet. They aren’t waiting for a vendor. They’re already solving the problem for themselves. If you want to know where a…