Eric von Hippel

Who is Eric von Hippel?

Eric von Hippel is an economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, he introduced the term lead user in 1986. von Hippel's work has applications in business strategy and free/open source software and von Hippel is one of the most highly cited social scientists writing on FOSS.

Eric von Hippel is the son of the material scientist and physicist Arthur Robert von Hippel who was also a professor at MIT. His great uncle is the German ophthalmologist Eugen von Hippel.

The BUGvonHippel is a breakout board module and an example of open-source hardware. It is named for von Hippel and its enclosure bears his name in Braille.

Prof von Hippel is a member of the Advisory Board of Patient Innovation, a nonprofit, international, multilingual, free venue for patients and caregivers of any disease to share their innovations.