Eric von Hippel - Free User Innovation Part 5

Welcome back to part five of this wonderful series on open innovation and free user innovation, before we come to eric i want to thank our sponsors of this series the kings of free innovation and connecting with the power of the crowd. Wazoku. They are pioneers of what they call total innovation, transforming how organizations solve challenges, drive growth, and deliver measurable results as the world's only networked innovation marketplace.

Wazoku connects people, ideas, and technology to create scalable, impactful innovation. You can discover more about Wazoku at wazoku. com. . Eric von Hippel. You're very welcome back. Thank you very much, Aiden. This has been real fun It's been so good, man. We, I've learned so much from you. And from the people you've brought into my world, which is great. We've, so far.

I thought we'd just do a very quick recap of what we've done, , the deep work into free user innovation, your work. Then you brought us deep dive into medicine, medical devices, et cetera. Pedro was on the show then, and we've just had Andrew talk about the legals of all this, but maybe in your words, you'd give us a quick recap of why we did it and what we did. Sure.

So the whole idea of this is to make your listeners aware of the importance of user innovation and the fact that they do it too. It's not just that one is passive and waiting around for producers to do something. 'cause often they won't, and if they do something, it isn't specific to you. So in the beginning I talked about that in my two initial sessions saying, Hey, look, a lot of times it doesn't pay producers to innovate and make precisely what you want. They don't understand what it is.

You're a market of one. So this is true. In every area that users care about. It's true. We talked about, the heart lung machine is true for the tools, in other words, that a surgeon uses, and it's also true for everything consumers do, like sports and so on. Basketball wasn't invented by a company making basketballs. Right. And mountain biking wasn't invented by a company making mountain bikes. 'cause in fact, no bike companies were.

So what I wanna talk about today, then we went in depth up to now saying first of all it exists. And secondly, because everybody cares about medicine and health, it's like, hey, it applies there too. Right? And that's what Pedro talked about and that's what Andrew talked about, that you have the legal right to do this stuff.

And by the way, you can just think to yourself how important this must be, because if you, for instance, have a chronic disease, you go and see your doctor for 15 minutes, four times a year for rheumatoid arthritis or diabetes or whatever. Who's running your life the rest of the time? Who's figuring out what to do? It's you. It isn't the doctor. So, today what I wanna talk about is summarizing that and saying, listen, there are huge opportunities for you out of this. You are doing it already.

You just have to be aware of it, and then you won't feel so passive in the face of, well, the manufacturer doesn't make exactly what I want. Right. You do it. We have faith in you doing it.

As an example, let's talk about mountain biking. Okay? Now this is a standard story about how things start. It's a sport. Manufacturers were making road bikes. And when you were a kid, you probably used a road bike, thin tires. You were very proud of it, zipping along. And what then happened was some bikers said, well, I think we wanna go down mountains instead of on roads. And so they took their road bikes and they tried to ride 'em down a mountain, specifically Mount Tamal Pius in California.

And of course the bikes fell apart. This was unfortunate 'cause they got the bikes from their parents as a gift for Christmas, but no worries, because it was a five year warranty. So they go into their, sports dealer with the warranty and the crushed bike and say, so gimme a new one. And the store says, well, what did you do with it? Well, I wrote down a mountain. You shouldn't have done that. Your warranty is void, right? You shouldn't have done that. Not what you do with a bike.

So that's so cool, right? Because they then said, just like in the case of the heart lung machine or anything else, we've talked about, well, if you are not gonna do it, I'm gonna build a bike. And so they built bikes for themselves. Initially called clunkers. They put 'em together. They had heavier tires. They were stronger in the frame. They used motorcycle brakes because the regular bike brakes weren't strong enough to help you down a mountain.

Now, that then was something that a few users did. Just like in the case, I told in an earlier episode about the heart lung machine companies making a million road bikes. Weren't really attracted to the idea of a hundred crazy people riding down Mount Tamal Pius, right? If we ignore 'em, maybe they'll go away, but they didn't go away. And eventually the sports spread. And today more than half of the many millions of mountain bikes or bikes sold are mountain bikes.

So once again, the users did it, but they didn't just say, Hey, look. Manufacturer of bikes make me a mountain bike. Because the answer was no. They had to do it. They had to demonstrate that there was a market, and then you got yourself a new sport. Now you know all that story. What I did not talk about, we focused on products.

What I did not talk about was the idea that it's also behaviors, so a mountain bike. Is no good unless you know how to ride down mountains, right? And so what the users were doing is not only pushing the hardware, they were pushing the behaviors. So first they'd write down and that was really great. But then after a while, they of course wanted more challenge. And so what they began to do was jump. Jump over rocks, jump down little cliffs, all that sort of thing.

Now when they jumped over rocks and down little cliffs, one of the things they discovered, 'cause these mountain bikes did not have any suspension, what they discovered is, man, this hurts when I come down. Oh, damn right. So manufacturers are saying basically, well, you shouldn't jump. Right. I mean, we sell you a mountain bike, you shouldn't jump.

So anyway, but of course they did jump and one guy who did jump was a orthopedic surgeon who realized, you know what, this is really bad for your back. And so what he did was he modified the post, the seat post of his bike, put a spring in it, made it easier. Now other people adopted that same old story and we don't have to go through that again. It's the same old story as any innovation. The user does it.

But the point here, I wanna raise this different, is what the user did was innovated in behaviors, in techniques. The thing, the reason you needed suspension was 'cause the user was doing something new in technique. Now that's kind of amazing because what it means is the value of a mountain bike depends not only in the hardware, it depends on what you can do with it, and that really is what the users are inventing.

A mountain bike is no damn good unless you have all these tricks up your sleeve and so on and so forth, and heck, and have fun going down mountains. So. Now we get to a funny place because before I said to you, you know what? Users come up with the first mountain bike and you say, yeah, okay. You gotta do that for yourself. Yeah. Okay. And then the manufacturers come in. Yeah. Okay. But they don't come in and sell you techniques. How do you diffuse techniques? Users do it peer to peer.

So you're going down the mountain. You go off a cliff, you fall down to the other side, the next guy down says, you know, bro, you did it wrong. Let me show you how to do that. And so without any marketplace, any producer involvement, except in the case of professional coaches, at the very, very, very high end, what you have is users both innovate and diffuse. Right.

So the idea of what is going on in the marketplace is really only a very small part of what basically is a user innovation system with manufacturers making pieces. So when you think to yourself about what you are doing, not only are you responsible for inventing or finding the new tools to make the new sport or the new hardware for whatever, you're also responsible for the behaviors.

Now, if you think about it further, like my daughter Christiana did a study the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, something like that. So I told my daughter, listen, do anything you want. If it happens to be user innovation, that's really good. So she was studying parents who were doing taking care of a first kid and they have a special site on Reddit with many thousands of people called Beyond the Bump. I'm sure there are other sites too. And the question was. How do you bring up a baby?

I don't know. What, how do you put a baby to sleep? So the point was there young parents were explaining to each other how they did it. In other words, they were sharing. Techniques, how do I get my baby to sleep? All these very strange things that I don't know if you have 'em in Europe, but you have 'em in the States. Well, what you do is you can put your baby's little bassinet thing on top of the clothes dryer and turn it on. Do you know about that one? Aiden? You do.

We put whiskey on the soother over here on the, Okay, well, I'll tell you just so we're clear. We don't. We don't, so I have no liability issues. We don't do that. No, we don't do that. But, but certainly that was not invented by Jim Beam, right here. Give whiskey to your baby, nor was putting the baby's bassinet thing on top of the dryer invented by General Electric or the maker of an appliance. Right? These are user behaviors applying standard equipment. But in a new way, right?

So when you think about that, think about, yes, you have to take care of your baby. There's advice going there, but you're also trying to run the rest of your life. And that all involves innovations. It all involves instant adjustments. It's like, oh my gosh, we can't bring little Billy over to Freddy's house today. Freddy's got the flu. What I do now, I'm supposed to give a lecture, you know? I mean, oh, I know what I'll do. I'll bring in the baby and entertain my students.

Anyway, you've all gone through this kind of a thing, so once again, you are responsible for your system of use. Other people can give you advice, but now. It will help you to conceive of it as a system of use. So you have a specific system of use around, let's say mountain biking as we talked about it. It's got products in it and it's got behaviors in it like jumping, and it intersects with everything else in your life that also has systems.

So Aiden, I know you play rugby. And maybe you can illustrate this. We off, we have to draw you in with your own experience. Tell us about it. Well, there's a, there was a couple actually that came to mind. One was, um, one of the things I think, and I somebody observed this, was that in, in rugby we have this thing called a line out where you. Lift a player and that they compete in the air for the ball.

And over years, you, you originally, you weren't allowed to lift players, but then they evolved and you were able to lift people. So lifting technique became important. And one of the ways we lifted people was just on the bottom of the quad, there's a, like a little shelf. So the bigger the quads, the more the shelf. But. What players started to do was they started to tape up their legs and then fold over a piece of padding behind that, so it would create this shelf.

And the shelf was, it was easier to lift a player then, so you'd get more hide out of him. But then somebody along the way went. That's a real pain for players all the time because you need to put the tape on. Your legs are sticky, rips all the hair off your legs, have to spray this special spray to remove the stickiness, and somebody created these pads that you just pull up and they have little shelves on them. And that, that was a behavior driven innovation that came to mind. Exactly.

Based on, on what you were saying about the bikes. That's fantastic. Yeah. Now there was another one you came up with. Tell us about that one Yeah, well the other one was behavior driven. So one of the, I had at one stage in my early career, I was trying to break into the team and. One of my coaches said, you know, you need to be good at a thing that people go, oh, Aiden's good at that thing. He said, you don't be a jack of all trades, be a master of one and be able to do the the other things.

And what he, I got, I broke my arm and I said to the fitness guy. Hey man, this is really specific. What I wanna do is be able to run really, really hard for like 10, 20 meters and then break a tackle and get a pass to somebody else to create space and be known for that guy, be that guy.

So, because I was injured, I had loads of time to work on this, I. And we worked on specific type of training, like where I do like three really heavy squats and then go out and run 20 meter sprint, come back, do more squats, do, did a sprint, and I came and I, I started to do it and ended up playing for, to loses specifically because I could do that thing. And again, it was behavior driven, but I, I then worked on it in order to build, build that skill, build that behavior. That's wonderful.

And notice in that case it was pure behavior. You didn't change the rugby ball, you didn't change the goal, you didn't write, change the lines on the field. It was really behavior. And in this particular case, you could do it without your teammates having to coordinate with you, right? You could just do it and be known as doing that thing. That's interesting because some other techniques probably involve coordination among the players, right? game plays or moves.

So when we have starter moves, et cetera, everybody has to be on the same page. But to your point, and you're educating me here, by the way, putting into my own context is. You can do this outside the system. Yeah. Yeah.

So this is fantastic. So, so this is really what I wanted to convey over these talks, and thank you so much for giving me the opportunity, Aiden. I mean, it's really fun, but the idea is that everybody stands around saying. I know where innovation comes from. It's the manufacturer, and then you never think to yourself that, oh, if you want a special recipe, it's not like you write to the Campbell Soup Company saying, please invent me a special can of soup. Right?

You go to the stove and get ingredients and you do it. So there's a huge amount of personal invention, whether you're a surgeon or a rugby player, or just any of us living our daily lives. When you're aware of that, you can say, you know what? I wanna be good at that. I wanna understand it as something I do. And that is what the sort of the field that I'm in about user innovation is all about.

It's breaking this mindset that we have to wait around till a producer does it and saying, no, you are free to do it. Here's how. Here's some tools that you can use. Here's some patterns. It's amazing. Go, go, go. I wanted to ask you one thing on that though. 'cause , the first time I learned about your work was actually was Christensen wrote , and referenced you and, . I, one of the things that came across to me was what he called and I don't know if it was his term, but customer captivity.

So you, you, build a product, you get really good at it and you fall into the rut of being really good at that and you stop seeing the edges. And Gary Hamill, who was a recent guest on the show, he said, you mistake the edge of the rush for the horizon. I loved how he said that. So you're like kind of going, yeah, we're doing this, we're doing really well.

You don't really see what's happening in the behaviors anymore, and because you're so involved in execution of your rush that you miss opportunities like this. And I wondered, had you some parting advice for our audience, for people who work in innovation to go how to do this, how to observe behaviors. What's your best in class, in your view? Yeah, so it's funny because Clay and I, um, we, we, he he eventually said, I really regretted writing that.

But what Clay said in his initial book was don't pay attention to your customers. You know, they'll mislead you. They'll never go for the bleeding edge. And the example that I gave back to him was, yeah, it's because you, the manufacturer won't change. So in other words, when companies were beginning, you know, in the old days you, the way you transmitted data from place to place was you put it on a tape and then you put a bunch of tapes on a truck and you send it somewhere else. Well, okay.

Then your customer for data transfer was talking to a trucking firm. Do you imagine those users who were switching over to the internet are gonna call the trucking firm and say, Hey, you know, you wanna get into the internet? No, they're just gonna suddenly leave one day, and so you have to focus on the users. And you can focus on the leading edge users, but it's not by any means just those people you've pulled into your orbit as your standard customers. No, you gotta look broadly.

I mean it's so cool.

We do these lead user studies and there's one wonderful one I can tell you about now. It's so cool. Do we have time? . Would love to. Would love to. So we're studying now, people who use home heating systems and so on, right? And there's big energy conservation and all the rest of it going on, right? And this is with two wonderful people Karin, Warner and SAMHSA Helo. And what we're saying is, okay, lead users are the ones. Not your customers who really break out of the box.

And so in this case, the Dutch heating system company or whatever it is, says, yeah, we've got this distribution of people and the amount of energy they use and we try to get 'em energy efficient furnaces and all the rest of that stuff. But then there are people who use 3% or less. Of the standard amount. It's not just they cut it by 20%, they cut it to practically zero. What are they doing? They're doing something entirely different.

What they're doing is heating their bodies instead of the environment. They shut off the furnaces. They're saying, well, wait a minute. Now when I'm outside, I'm not trying to heat nature. So they went on an entirely different path, and a furnace company would not be able to cope with that. They don't make clothing, so there's a giant break in the data that nobody is paying attention to. It's at the leading edge. And so that's lead user studies. I guess we didn't get into that.

You guys all have to read this stuff. Absolutely, and I'm gonna try and get Eric in to do another episode on that. You gave me a breadcrumb for the future man. One of the future. Yeah. So let's see whether people like what we did so far. Oh, , the feedback's been absolutely wonderful. Eric, for people who wanna find you, find those free books that you give away. You really eat your own cooking. Where's the best place to find you?

if you go to my MIT website, , just enter my name , into the search bar, and one of the things that'll show up is my MIT website and on my MIT website, there are free books, free articles, free videos, all sorts of things that I hope will help you and that you might enjoy. It's been a wonderful pleasure doing this with you. I've learned so, so much and I'm only at the start of the rabbit hole. I look forward to going. Further, further down, down.

It's been an absolute pleasure, author of Free Innovation, Eric von Hippel. Thank you for joining us.