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Eric Arthur von Hippel

Eric Arthur von Hippel

· T Wilson (1953) Professor in Management

Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Technological Innovation Entrepreneurship and Strategic Mgmt

Active 1976–2025

h-index78
Citations61.9k
Papers2218 last 5y
Funding—

Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.

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About

Eric von Hippel is a Professor of Technological Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research specializes in the nature and economics of distributed and free innovation. He focuses on understanding how innovation can be developed and improved through contributions from individuals, open user communities, and firms. In addition to his research, Professor von Hippel develops and teaches practical methods that can be applied to enhance innovation development processes across various contexts.

Research topics

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Epistemology
  • Marketing
  • Psychology
  • Data science
  • Cognitive psychology
  • World Wide Web
  • Demographic economics
  • Economics

Selected publications

  • Next-generation consumer innovation search: Identifying early-stage need-solution pairs on the web

    Research Policy · 2020 · 68 citations

    1st authorCorresponding

    All innovations consist of a need paired with a responsive solution - a need-solution pair (von Hippel and von Krogh 2016). Today, technical advances in machine learning techniques for natural language understanding, such as semantic word space models and semantic network analytics, have made it practical to capture descriptions of early-stage, need-solution pairs mentioned anywhere in the open, textual content of the Internet. Producers - and anyone - can now thus look for user innovations post…

    PublisherDOI

  • Household Innovation, R&D, and New Measures of Intangible Capital

    National Bureau of Economic Research · 2019-01-01 · 37 citations

    articleSenior author

    Household R&D (or household innovation) is an important source of innovation that has to date been largely overlooked in research related to national accounts. Indeed, it is not currently counted as investment in the literatures on household production and human capital. This paper develops time series estimates of nominal investment, real investment, and real capital stocks for household R&D for product innovations in the United States. (We focus on product innovations because survey data on se…

    Publisher

  • When patients become innovators

    2019-07-18 · 23 citations

    book-chapterSenior author
    PublisherDOI

  • Profiting from Data Commons: Theory, Evidence, and Strategy Implications

    Strategy Science · 2023-09-15 · 22 citations

    articleSenior author

    We define data commons as repositories of freely-accessible, “open source” innovation-related data, information and knowledge. Data commons are and can be a significant resource for both innovating and innovation-adopting firms and individuals. First, the availability of free data and information from such commons reduces the innovation-specific private or open investment required to access the data and make the next innovative advance. Second, the fact that the data are freely accessible lowers…

    PublisherDOI

  • Need-solution pair recognition by household sector individuals: Evidence, and a cognitive mechanism explanation

    Research Policy · 2020 · 20 citations

    Senior authorCorresponding

    Problem-solving by everyday individuals is thought to occur as a two-step process. First, an individual identifies or formulates a problem, followed by entering into a subsequent search to find the best solution. Here, however, we consider an alternative process that everyday individuals may use for solution finding first theorized by von Hippel and von Krogh (2016). Specifically, von Hippel and von Krogh proposed that everyday individuals may sometimes discover a solution and the need it satisf…

    PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

  • Emmanuelle Fauchart

    University of Fribourg

    28 shared

  • Georg von Krogh

    ETH Zurich

    21 shared

  • Ralph Katz

    16 shared

  • Carliss Y. Baldwin

    15 shared

  • Jeroen P.J. de Jong

    Utrecht University

    11 shared

  • Harold J. DeMonaco

    8 shared

  • Nikolaus Franke

    8 shared

  • Stefan Thomke

    Boston University

    7 shared

Labs

Awards & honors

  • National Medal of Science from the Government of Portugal (2…
  • Innovation Luminary Award from the European Commission
  • 2015 Innovative Management Partner (IMP) Excellence in Innov…
  • Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foun…
  • Honorary Doctorate of Economics and Social Science by the Te…

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