Democratizing Innovation

For quite a while now, I have been an ardent supporter of Open Source movements and Community-based innovations. Be it Linux, GNU and likes (software), OpenCores, gEDA (VLSI - hardware), Wikipedia (Man's greatest gift to mankind!)or the Mozilla Foundation (Firefox, Thunderbird and likes); the potential of such efforts have always managed to impress me.

A year ago, I came across a brilliant work on such community-based Innovation setups. This one was by Eric Von Hippel of MIT Sloan. It's titled 'Democratizing Innovation', and true to its name, its licensed freely on a Creative Commons license. (You can get your copy here). A highly recommended read!

But the more interesting part lies in Von Hippel trying to put together a community of researchers who would open-source their innovations and research papers so that others can build on them. This already exists on the technical front (IEEE, ACM et al). Von Hippel, though, tries to put together a community of researchers which in the website's own words - "opens up new questions and avenues for exploration in fields ranging from economics to management of technology to organizational behaviour to marketing research". So, here is UserInnovation.MIT.edu for you.