Eric von Hippel - Free User Innovation

Welcome to a brand new series on the innovation show on the work of eric von hippel 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.

Now to our guest, he is professor of technological innovation in the MIT Sloan school of management. He specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and free innovation he also develops and teaches about practical methods, individuals open user communities and firms can apply to improve their innovation development processes he is, eric van hippel welcome to the show Thanks very much.

I really look forward to chatting with you and I'm glad you have an interested audience. Me and eric actually connected it's it's almost two years ago now man since we first connected i'm we were planning recording something together and we went down a rabbit hole talking about health and looking after yourself and you have a great interest in that and you were telling me for those people are watching us. You were in the gym and you actually banged your head off one of the gym equipment.

So for those people watching us, that's what happened, Eric. Yeah. Exercise is dangerous. That's all. Well, it's a good, it's a good sign because you're doing work to prevent falls that could lead to bruises like that, but actually, You, you, there is some collateral damage from doing it. So just to get that outta the way, Eric, so people know what what's going on here. And it, it's so great to have you on the show, man. You mentioned Thomas Kuhn in the book, you mentioned paradigm shifts.

You have introduced this new paradigm and I thought that would be a great way to start is.

What is this paradigm of free innovation? It was also very closely linked to open innovation. So maybe we'll distinguish those things, get some terminology out onto the table today and give an introduction, and then we'll be back for another part where we go a bit deeper into the work. Sure. So, free innovation. I guess I can best introduce it with a little context.

Historically, ever since an economist named Schumpeter brought innovation into economics historically it's been the case that people say, oh yeah, producers innovate. Producers are the ones, they come to you and they look deep into your eyes and they say, oh my god, I know what you need, I'll do it, and I'll make a bunch of money. And that has been, even to this day, how the innovation process is understood.

So, if you take, for instance an innovation entrepreneurship course at MIT or elsewhere, it'll start with, look around, find an unfilled need, and then go and patent the hell out of your solution to it and sell it and so on. In other words, the user, the consumer, in all these cases, is thought of as, you know, Just having needs, not innovating. So this really the beginning of this whole thing about user centered innovation, free innovation, is that as a kid, I knew that wasn't true.

I mean, I looked around and I was always inventing things. If I needed something, I sure in hell didn't write to AT& T saying, making me a new phone, you know, I'd build a new phone. Never would have occurred to me that AT& T would be interested, and of course they wouldn't. So, it's every kid's experience, and every scientist's experience, that you have to create what you need for yourself.

So when I came across, in graduate school, Schumpeter, and so on, I just knew that was not the whole story. So, how to show others it's not the whole story?

Well, we did a bunch of studies where we showed that prior to producers innovating, prior to producers making, for example, center pivot irrigation, Producers making skateboards. Users did it. So, I don't know if you know, what center pivot irrigation is. You might. It's, it's these giant things that create circles and they're irrigating crops, right? So, that was a hell of a labor saving thing. The pipes moved automatically on their own, sort of like a giant sprinkler system.

But it wasn't invented by irrigation manufacturers. It was some farmer who said, damn it, I'm really tired of lugging all this pipe around. I'm going to build it and then built it out of scrap materials. Now, then what happens is manufacturers say, there's no market in that. You know, I mean, if there were, we would have thought of it. And so then. It sits there, the user does it, but then other farmers around him begin to copy it.

And eventually what happens is the manufacturer says, Oh, yeah, that's a really good idea. And then it was so funny. I mean, they often pick up the user prototype and they improve it in various ways, make it more reliable and stuff. And then they claim to have invented it. You know, they say, oh yeah, well, you know, that user, yeah, something, pile of pipes, no, we did the brilliant thing, by R X Y Z. Now, in case of consumer goods, this is even more the case.

I mean, who do you think came up with a skateboard? It wasn't Mattel or a manufacturer who said, oh, I know what I'll do. I'll put wheels under a board. No steering wheel. Send killed kids down the hill. Ha ha! And hide from my liability insurance guy. No, it was kids who did it. And other kids made copies. And manufacturers thought, this is the worst idea in the world. How is this possible? And furthermore, gee, we're selling a million bikes a year. And there are 200 users of skateboards?

Forget it. So what happens is evidence of market need builds, but the evidence of market need builds because there is a solution out there that users developed and that others can observe. And this is true in every field, consumer, medical, everything. Now, that changes how we think about the innovation process. And what makes me really happy about it, is it empowers us all. We're all there, we're saying, no, we don't have to wait around for some manufacturer to notice we need something.

We can build it. And it's fun. And it's exciting. And that's the way the world works. So brilliant set up for us and i'm on it as you know i have tons of notes here and i'm actually thinking it's like one of those speeches and they tear up the speech and go you know what i'm gonna speak from the heart and i think we'll just go off script because. You've set us up so beautifully and I'd love to just share a few examples of this.

So on recent shows, for example, I'll throw some out at you and I'd love you to just riff on them. And maybe you can bring it somewhere else and to your own work and your own research, your own examples. Of them recently was Haier the white's good manufacturer, brilliant company, and I heard about this where they had observed that farmers were using their washing machines to wash potatoes Yeah.

and then they actually were like on you know what instead of actually going on those crazy farmers they're like well actually let's create one for washing potatoes and, what i'm getting on here is that there is a benefit also as a company from the other side of innovation the non free side the shumpertarian paradigm to actually go well if i observe here or i work with the free innovators i can actually create something that's needed in the economy Absolutely right..

And instead of somebody saying, Oh, I think I need a potato washer, but then once Haier makes it deciding, no, I don't want one, the fact that it's needed is demonstrated because people are doing it and by the way, I know the folks that hire and in the, in the in the GE version of it, in the U. S., And they now, they're part of my innovation lab, and they now have systematized what you're talking about.

So one of the things they did, it's so cool, is they started talking to their employees who were from different cultures than the standard U. S. one. And trying to see what they did with their washing machines. Now, people of Hispanic background, it turned out, felt that the clothing had to soak. And the machine didn't have a soak cycle. So what they would do is open the lid and leave it open for half an hour. That would stop the machine. So they invented their own soak cycle.

Now the parents of these employees often didn't speak English, so they couldn't read the labels on this damn thing. Right? So, fabulous. The people in the household would say, Oh, okay, here, here's a sticky note. Do this. And so again, the whole idea of these, these instructions we have in English don't mean a damn thing to 30 percent of our audience. And so, so again, but it's not, Oh, I'm sitting here and have a need. It's I'm demonstrating I have a need because I'm changing your machine.

I'm customizing it for my family, myself. And that's, that's how it goes. And that's, that's the new method that we're teaching. one of the things i wanted to share with you that the sponsor of. The innovation show of particularly the concept of open innovation or. Connected innovation where you're actually engaging the audience is a company, you know, innocentive In a sense of sure.

Innocentive was acquired by wazoku who's our sponsor and they acquired every one of these kind of platforms for engaging with the crowd. and the crowd producing ideas etc i love you to share your view of that and what you have seen because when you have a platform like that to engage kind of like Haier have done, you can have open platforms like this where you reward these free innovators so there's some skin in the game for them,

Yes. So, yeah, crowdsourcing and so on. And God, I've been around a while. So I also helped at the start of an innocentive. So funny. Yeah. But there's now a new way to go about this. So when you have a crowd, you have to somehow invest in bringing them in. You don't bring in everybody. You have to filter through what they did. Now we do something different. What we do is we say, Look, all these people are talking to each other.

You know, the people who, you know, make racing bicycles and improve them. They're talking to each other. There's surgeons who make a better heart lung machine. They're talking to each other. Let's go on the web. Let's find people who say, I had a problem and I solved it. And then as a separate analysis, Let's find those things that are building a lot of chatter around it and I adopted it.

Wow. It's true You know, so what we used to have to say in terms of skateboards It was the kids in California or wherever they were, you know, you had to be a direct observer now because of AI and the web you can identify these things in 15 minutes and And categorize them and say, what do you want to explore further? Cause then of course you want to explore further. Yeah. a free innovator.

And how self reward is often the reward from an altruistic perspective, but also a little bit of that can be, we've all had ideas where we've had the idea and we've taken no action. And then that idea manifests in the real world several years later. And you'll go, I had that idea five years ago. Most, most of us have done that, but there's a little bit of in us, the lack of well, I couldn't be assed.

been the one who goes and makes this happens gets funding and brings it to life but i'll i'll hack together some prototype no problem in my garage that type of idea but also then there's the real altruistic thing and one of the great heroes of this i thought was jonah Salk and is polio vaccine and when he was asked about it you know i got a patent this thing is like you can't patent this thing the world owns it and i thought that was a nice way to set up the

characteristics of these free innovators It's a really interesting point you raise. And the thing is, it's not just altruism. In other words, what we find is that a user innovates because he needs it or she needs it. Right? They are rewarded by using it. That farmer who built the first center pivot irrigation system, he wasn't doing it so others could eventually benefit. He needed it today. That kid who built a skateboard, he needed it. He wasn't thinking of selling something.

And so, what you find often is that sometimes these kids become entrepreneurs, for example, or the surgeon does, or whatever. But very often they don't. because they have satisfied their own problem. Give you an example. I had a personal example. I had a tendon that was inflamed. And so went to the surgeon, surgeon said, ah, well, you know what you have to do is you have to wear this damn ski boot. You've seen those kinds of things, right? more than too many times man Yeah.

And so I'm saying, well, You know, I can't even get around in this goddamn thing, right? I mean, the, the ankle doesn't bend and all the rest of this. And he says, yeah, too bad. Some of my some of my clients, oh, they're amazing. They play basketball in it. And I'm like, yeah. So anyway, I went home and I sort of looked and I saw that the tendon that I wanted to protect from motion was, was not affected if I put in an ankle joint in this thing. So then I could walk around much better.

So I chopped up the boot and put in a joint and, and then was able to walk around much more effectively. Right? So solve my own need. Now, here's the thing. I went into the surgeon then, and I said, Hey you know, you could have this for God's sakes is a lot better than the stuff that you're handing out in the supply room there. He said, Well, you know what, Eric? I'd have to go through the FDA. Why don't you go through the FDA for me? And I'm like, no, I've got other stuff to do.

This is not my main job, you know? And so for that reason, you can have, you know, your wish to do something, you solve it for yourself, but then you don't necessarily want to commercialize it. If you hand it on, that's a form of altruism. Yes. But on the other hand, it costs a bunch of money to protect something. Why would you do that? You know, so you hand it on and then somebody else who wants to be an entrepreneur can pick it up

And really important aspect to build on that is the importance of diffusion. And as you say, the paradigm has actually even changed once again, in a digital realm, where you can actually diffuse very, very quickly, particularly if it's a 3d design or it's a software Apache is an example you give. Yeah. This is fabulous. And, and in fact, we're studying in China now how this really goes very quickly. They have tea tables over there. Everybody has a factory.

You bring something in, they just make it, and they see if the market wants it, and they just do this very cheaply, and, and, yeah, so the diffusion thing is getting solved, but, because of the low costs. But again, it's not necessarily the person who does it for their own need, who also wants to do that. And that opens an opportunity for entrepreneurs and companies. Because they can say, hey, just like the hire example.

Hey, that, that lady is not going to patent the idea of opening the lid of the washer to pause wash. She just wants it done. We can do that. And it fits their commercial interest and her use interest. There's a great example where the gentleman who, commercialized Red Bull was in a taxi in Thailand and noticed the taxi drivers are drinking this thing to keep them awake, to keep them more alert. And an example of the entrepreneur willing to go drop their job go and develop these things.

And I bring that up because. When you wrote this book free innovation and i'm gonna share a link for those who haven't seen it already i'm sharing links to eric he's he is the king of this i'll link to eric site where you can find all his articles all his work but also he is kind enough to give away PDF of this book as well where you can download and indeed

other variations of digital downloads .But in the book you say in just six countries that you had surveyed at the time tens of millions of individuals in household sectors had been found to collectively spend tens of billions of dollars in time.

and materials their own money per year developing products for their own use and over ninety percent of them met both the criteria of defining free innovation, in that they developed their innovations during unpaid discretionary time and they did not protect the designs they developed from adoption by others free. This is a really important aspect i'd love you to riff on?. yeah. Again, you raise a very good point.

The thing is, we always assume, because it's producer centered, producers make money by protecting something and getting a monopoly on it. That's why entrepreneurship courses say, Oh, if you want to commercialize something, try to protect it so that you are the entrepreneur. But the world of users is not driven that way. The world of users is driven by I need it.

Now, some of the people, about 5 percent or so, will say, Oh, okay, now I did this thing and I'm going to go ahead and, and make a company. And interestingly enough, this has to do with opportunity costs. When we studied scientists, for example, they never started a scientific instrument company, but in sports equipment, where these kids are young, they don't have a job anyway. They want to sell surfboards to make beer money. There, they often flow into an entrepreneur.

i was using the red bull example to go. This this is an entrepreneur who goes i'm gonna go after this he he made then or she first put all their own time into it then get funding but then there's the free innovators who actually do this in their own time at night time in their shed, you know i'm one of the things i would love you to talk about is. We hear about the twenty percent time in places like three m or google talk about it for example, And i thought a bit well.

A company can also unlock free innovators in their own company and companies like hire for example where they actually make them co owners of the idea they come up with and they fast track them they give me distribution etc. What's your view on that because that has changed quite a bit in organizations over the last time for good and for bad. Yeah. Yeah. So specifically with respect to sort of free time and, and getting your own innovators.

The issue is that, oh, and by the way, one other thing related to your Red Bull example. Very often the entrepreneurs don't credit or give anything back to the innovator.

Like the Red Bull guy did probably not seek out that Thai taxi driver again and say, Hey here, you know, I often think about it if somebody gave you the winning lotto ticket for your birthday would you give up give them some of the money back or that famous movie with nicolas cage where he was a cop and he didn't have money for a tip it was with bridget fonda and he went back he found her and he gave her like a million dollars cuz you won the lottery right, right, right, right,

but that never happens in real life. Well, it does when some companies start to, and this will relate to your point when some companies say, Oh, we now understand that we get ideas from users. They often will figure out a form of reward for the community. So for instance, Lego gets a lot of designs from their users. But the reason the users come up with these is sort of community action.

So that if you just took one person and said, Here, we're going to give you 3 percent of sales or something, you'd wreck the community. So what they do is they give community rewards, like they give people tons of Legos and sponsor, you know, sort of events to encourage the activity and also to give back. So there are many ways to give back besides sort of contractual. Most people don't do it. They just sort of grab the idea and then pretend it was theirs.

But now back to the, back to the 20 percent time zone. The thing is that the really good user innovations come from a combination of circumstances that a company can't predict. So that if you restrict yourself to a few lead users inside your own company, You're unlikely to get the best stuff. Let me give you an illustration. You probably know about this. You know the Camelback thing? The water thing? Ha I used to have one. Yeah. My, my wife threw it out. She's like, and you never use this thing.

I will one day it was in the attic and you got rid of it. She's a, she's one of those Marie Kondo minimalists. So she got rid of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, this guy, Edson, I think was his name. Edison, Edson. He was a bike racer. Long distance bike racer, in Texas, in the summer. So, there was a real need for hydration.

And in those days, as you know, probably, you had a bracket and you had a little water bottle on the front bracket and you'd have to break position, reach down, grab the damn bottle, you know, drink from it and then get it back into that location and pedal on. Now, everybody had that problem. Nobody thought about it. But this guy was also an emergency medical technician. And he brought his truck to the race. And he was used to hydrating people who had heat stroke.

So he went to his truck where he had bags of liquid and he had surgical tubing. He pinned the bag to the back of his shirt, right? Now here's the point. He might never invent anything else in his life. If you had a bunch of bike riders in a company, the company amongst those people might well not come up with that. Because the combination is one in a million. So, yes, it's a great idea to encourage your workers and stuff like that, but really what you need is an outside search technique.

You need a method to see everything that's going on out there and saying, whoa, that one's gaining speed. Right? So that's what I suggest. You know, the company as innovator, it was in your case of Red Bull, right? What an odd example that there was a guy drinking this stuff in Thailand and an entrepreneur in his cab who recognized that. Now, if you were a company, you could have a hell of a lot of people in there taking taxis and they'd never come across it, right?

So, so that's why you sort of have to scan the world, and that's why things like Inocentive that draw on a specific crowd aren't as good as the new, you know, sort of large language model methods we have to search the entire web for signs of what's going on. There's a really important nugget in there.

And I fear that will be missed from many people who read books often skip the introduction and i find sometimes in the introduction there's a nugget in there that doesn't then reappear elsewhere in the book like the introduction, isn't just here's what's coming in the book there's often a nugget and a piece in there that doesn't appear and i'd love you to describe this one you're talking about, The idea of the paradigm and paradigms, a Greek word that means pattern.

So the pattern of thinking, Yep, and if the pattern of thinking in an organization is. We need to have some type of innovation method to go after commercial opportunities. That means that focus leads to inattentional blindness of other opportunities. And this is the piece I'd love you to describe as a, as a parting nugget for our audience today If there's anything else you get, it's this, because this happens time and time again, where they have great intentions of being more innovative.

But their structures and the systems they have in place actually alienate ideas from being seen in the first place. Yep, these are very good points. So, absolutely, based on the Schumpeterian idea that you find a need and fill it, almost every company in this and every other known universe has set up a system for sensing needs. They have marketing research going out there saying, Oh, what do you need?

And people say things like, well, you know, those blueberry muffins you make, I'd like a few more blueberries in them. Right? Say, ah, okay, we can do that. Now, meanwhile, the big innovations, because we were talking earlier before the show about Clayton Christensen. The disruptive innovations, more than half of them come from user innovators like that guy with the backpack we just talked to. So what happens?

The present system, as you said, is absolutely blind to the things on the margins that are growing. The leading edge. They want the center. They want to know if you want a few more blueberries in the muffin. Right? So, how do ideas actually get in that are good? They often go around the system. So, I'll give an example. We were studying scientific instrument companies.

Scientific instrument companies had these things where they had staff to sell them and they had marketing research and all the rest of this. And the guy on the top says, well, yeah, we got a system, you know, it works like the Schumpeterian thing, standard thing, and we're getting new products. So we went behind to say, well, where actually are these new products coming from?

And where they were coming from was field service technicians who were the ones going out to all the professors using the instruments. The professors had hacked the instruments. The field service guys came back to R& D and said, Hey, hey, look at this. Look at what this guy did. And the manufacturers did it, and then the system took credit, you know, like, Ah, yeah, I guess we must have marketing research that's working.

No. So many of these people, if they look at where their innovations really come from, it's not the standard machinery. And that is the struggle that I and many other people have gone through, because companies just can't change. They just can't change. Sometimes you get a company typically in the digital area that'll figure it out and do it. But most companies, they just say, well, this is what we do. I've gone out and demonstrated the method cause I want to spread it, right?

Demonstrated the method. Companies like, you know, Nestle and 3M and so on big companies demonstrated the method. Wow. Look what happens. We get, you know, a really good thing out of this. Then what happens? Well, I leave thinking, Oh good. Now they'll take this up. And then they don't. And I go back and I say, well, you know, you got yourself 10 X improvement here. How come you didn't do it again? And they'll say, well, listen, I'm in marketing research and the way I'm judged is on my budget.

What you did cost them a hundred thousand dollars. I can put together a focus group and come up with an idea for 5, 000. By the time that idea actually gets out there, nobody will remember that I was the source, right? So, hey, I'm not doing that, even if it's better for the company, cause , I've got my niche, I've got my metrics, forget it. There's an old proverb it's like society advances when men plant trees under his shade they'll never sit. Love it from an innovation perspective.

Cause that exact point, take a football coach? I'm a football coach. Why would I invest heavily in the academy and in an under 10 player? yeah, Because i won't be coach when that person actually becomes yeah, yeah, star if they become the next star and it's that it's that challenge is is an absolute killer. Innovation there's a there's a piece i just can't let go of that you talked about is a quote i don't know a great innovator bookminster fuller who you know Oh, I know him, yeah, I knew him.

And he had a great line he said all human advances happen in the outlaw area you call it.

Are they outlawed zone something like that and what i thought about actually came to mind recently one of my roles as a college professor and i was correcting essays you know that task of correcting essays i just finished actually yesterday exhausted, but i actually changed my own lens of that i used to see it as this pain and now i see it as a source of kind of like open innovation free innovation of people bringing sources of information

so i read them actually with a tabla rasa and treat them with humility and read them properly and one of the things that came up and it was written by a lot of students are from like korea china and they wrote a lot about deep fake the whole idea of deep fake with artificial intelligence where.

i could clone you and get you to say something that wasn't you and they were saying that in in their societies deep fakes are huge problem with pornography, where they're taking stars but also now in some countries they can take a lady's picture of the internet and create a deep fake of her and actually can ruin their lives and i thought about how well that was similar what happened in, Digital age with things like youtube and all the advances we see on technology

like we're using here actually a lot of it came from the pornography industry because they were the ones who pioneered a lot of this software and where people want to be able to scroll through the videos are, be able to jump ahead and things like this so i thought it's a slightly sensitive area but that really, Highlights the area where you're looking at those edges and sometimes those edges are not black or white, Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, with respect to your grading of essays and so on, and talking about planting a tree you'll never live under, I mean, you have a good heart. That's really nice. And it's nice to know. And it's true that, you know, I've emphasized the idea that people develop things because they want to use them for their own benefit. And there's advantages to that because they can try them out in a real environment and see if they work or not and tell their friends.

But there are people who are altruistic. Like, I don't know if you know, but there's a system now where if there's a earthquake or whatever, and people are buried under their houses and they have phones. Some of them, and so they can call in where they are. Well, some altruistic open source folks in New York came up with a system for collecting this stuff and feeding it back to local citizens. And they did that not because they were in this mess. but because they wanted to help.

There are lots of examples of that too. I'll tell you a really cool one, which I love. It's it's called the Enable, E Nable project. It's fabulous. So, kids sometimes are born without hands. There's some sort of a thing in the something in the uterus that somehow if something gets wrapped around where the hand should be, it doesn't develop.

And so, there are quite a few of these kids and, and they get teased and it's terrible and to get a myoelectric hand, you know, it's a 10, 000 gadget, the kid keeps growing. If the kid puts it in water, as a kid will, the thing is fried. You know, it's just totally. impractical solution. So, what happened was, you know, with the evolution of 3d printers, some guy who had a neighbor kid who had this problem built a plastic hand that could be manipulated.

And it costs like less than five bucks worth of material. He open sourced the design. And so around the world now, there's a network of people making free hands for kids. And these hands, it's so cool. These hands They're not this ugly medical looking thing. There's sort of like a transformer's hand or, you know, one of those things. And you can get it in the colors you want, whether it's pink or whatever the hell it is, and it looks really cool.

And so the story I really loved was because this kid was being teased, you know, by his You know, kids in third grade and so on can be cruel. And he was being teased and he was really sad about it. And then he went to school with this thing and some other kid went home to his mother and said, listen, I want what Jimmy has. Can't you just cut off my hand and I can get one? You know, and his mother refused but the spirit was there.

brilliant i heard just on that i heard this beautiful story where poor kids had, cancer and lost their hair through chemotherapy and in solidarity, the teacher shaved her head. Oh, that's then the next day, loads of the kids came in and they had shaved their heads as well. And I thought it was just beautiful. Wasn't it beautiful. That's absolutely lovely. a good heart. Absolutely a good heart. And yeah. So anyway yeah, that's the story.

So you also wanted to know the difference between open innovation and the kind of stuff I'm calling free innovation. Let's get that in and then hopefully we'll come back together again, Eric, just to explain to our audience, he's going to tee us up us to some other open innovators, free innovators, people who have done amazing work and. We had initially planned to go chapter by chapter through the book, but Eric had a better idea Being the open innovator I am, I listened to him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to co create this and Eric will be behind pulling the strings and I'll be doing the executing on the front end and I will be giving them the credit as well. Don't worry about that. No need. But yeah, let's finish on that. And then what we're going to do is come back the next day for those of you who are reading along. There's a figure 1. 1 in the book and it shows the difference between the open paradigm and the schumpeterian paradigm.

We are going to cover that. We're going to cover that briefly in episode two, and then we're going to go where the wind takes us in the future. But let's finish on this idea of open versus free. So, so the thing is that the term open, Henry Chesbrough came up with that. And, and people were, you know, interested in it, sort of galvanized interest and attention. And that was good.

But it mixed up things because, Basically, it said, you know, you can buy, sell, you know, exchange, IP, and so on was where that started. And it wasn't really about user innovation more narrowly. So users innovate. That's the big focus of what I'm doing because it turns out to be huge and against the standard wisdom. But it's, it's, it is, again, it's narrower than open because open these days can mean almost anything. So, so just to focus in, users innovate for their own uses.

They often give it away free, which makes free innovation because they've solved their own need. And they don't intend to produce. And that pattern is, is quite unique to the idea of user and open free innovation.

Beautiful absolutely from the man himself the pioneer of free innovation it's been an absolute pleasure i really really grateful for your time i'm Delighted. how we've created this and where we go in the future as well last question for eric is. Where can people find your materials ? I have an MIT website, which has all sorts of downloadable free materials and see what you think. Absolute pleasure talking to you , eric van hippel thank you for joining us Delighted, Aidan.