I found a wealth of materials on leading innovation exercises inside organizations — and fostering users to innovate themselves at the homepage of MIT/Sloan professor Eric von Hippel.
Four Basic Lectures
These videos are posted on YouTube by MIT OpenCourseWare. You are free to use and download them as you like under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I hope you find them useful.
- 1. The Paradigm Shift from Producer to User Innovation
- 2. Basing New Commercial Products on “Lead User” Innovations
- 3. Users Working Together in Communities Are Powerful Innovators
- 4. Toolkits to Support Product Development by Customers
Lead User Teaching Materials
Lead User Project Handbook This practical how-to-do-it handbook was developed to teach company teams how to do lead user projects during our research at 3M and elsewhere. Many find it a useful resource for lead user teams today as is – or you can modify it and update it as you like. (For example, it could use updating to emphasize Internet search – it was written in the mid 1990’s)
Lead User Project Videos The videos below can be used in conjunction with the Lead User Project Handbook. Each video addresses one major aspect of a lead user project in 10-15 minutes. (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license).
To view the videos, simply click on its title below and you will be taken to the video on YouTube. If you would like to download the video to your hard drive, right-click (or control click) on the link after “Download:” and select “Save as”. The files are very large and may take some time to download.
- Overview of the lead user process (Download: 525MB)
- Launching your lead user study (Download: 537MB)
- Interviewing methods for lead user project teams (Download: 490MB)
- Identifying emerging market needs (Download: 582MB)
- Identifying lead users (Download: 628MB)
- Developing solution concepts (Download: 757MB)