02-11-2008
From Innovation to Implementation
I recently watched an introductory lecture to a course offered at MIT called “How to Develop ‘Breakthrough’ Products and Services.” It’s offered through MIT’s OpenCourseWare. The professor, Eric von Hippel, spoke about the origin of breakthrough ideas. They don’t come from ideating sessions in darkened conference rooms; they don’t come from company designers explicitly trying to think of something new. They come from users who encounter real-world problems and develop tools to solve those problems.
He goes on to explain that successful companies don’t come up with great innovation themselves; instead, they are good at finding and identifying user-generated innovations and putting them into production.
A good example of innovation is in the products made by the people at the Center for History and New Media. I have heard more history faculty gush about the usefulness of Scribe, and now Zotero (a bibliographic management tool with added note-taking functionality), than you can shake a stick at. I wonder how they developed their ideas for these tools.
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