Thanks to Michael Fitzgerald of the New York Times for his great article in the Business Section of the Sunday New York Times, How to Improve It? Ask Those Who Use It!. He includes a nice photo of Eric von Hippel of MIT with "lead user", Dr. Nathanial Sims, an anesthiologist at Mass General, whose inventions have included an intelligent, self-monitoring drug infusion pump, which generated $700 million in sales its first year.
The thrust of the article is that your lead users and customers are the most predictable and successful source of new product innovations, which is, of course, also the main message of Outside Innovation!
In this one short article, Michael Fizgerald manages to cram in mentions of over several different customer-led innovations:
- The Nat Rack, one of Nathaniel Sims' inventions
- The Smart Pump, another one.
- Counter-Strike , a game built by customers on top of Half-Life
- Apache
- Mozilla FireFox
- Burton Snowboards
- SawStop
- LEGO MindStorms
Fitzgerald also cited Instructables--a community for citizen inventors, from Squid Labs. This is a great find! Brought to you by the folks at Squid Labs--Check out the Squid Labs' blog.
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Finds like instructables are so refreshing and fun. In order to incite creativity within our group here at work, I have circulated the site. Truly innovative and inspiring.
Posted by: Brian | April 04, 2007 at 09:59 AM
We're glad you found us here at Instructables! The Squid Labs blog doesn't see much traffic these days- it has largely moved to the instructables blog.
You can also follow the discussion on innovation on our Forums.
Posted by: Christy | March 28, 2007 at 07:45 PM