The Sources of Innovation by Eric von Hippel

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 333 their personal lives, their work with Edison, and their correspondence with a number of important figures. The Upton Collection also contains the class notes Upton took while a student of von Helmholtz. Both of these later collections contain materials that fall outside the chronology of Part II, but selections from all years were filmed to preserve the integrity of each collection. The microfilms contain editorial aids, called targets, that introduce each series, subseries, volume, and folder, and provide cross refer­ ences to related materials. Of particular value, the targets give information on material that was not selected for filming, thus providing scholars with access to the entire Edison archives. A few of the microfilms are difficult to read, especially in the Letterbook Series, but this is to be expected given the difficulty in reading even original 19th-century letterbooks. The printed guide contains an essay on the editorial procedures, notes on each series in the collection, an Index to Authors and Recipients, an Index to Financial Documents, and a Chronological Index to Technical Notes and Drawings. This last index is especially useful since the Edison Papers present the historian of technology with a particularly rich source for the study of the role of nonverbal thinking in technological development. The scholarly community has reason to be grateful for the Edison Papers project and to look forward to the publication of the rest of the microfilm edition. David F. Channell Dr. Channell is associate professor of historical studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has just completed The History of Engineering Science: An Annotated Bibliography for Garland Publishing and The Vital Machine: A Study of the Relationships between Technology and Organic Life for Oxford University Press. The Sources of Innovation. By Eric von Hippel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pp. xi + 218; tables, notes, appendix, bibli­ ography, index. $27.00. Eric von Hippel, professor of management of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written a book aimed at corporate managers of research and development and government policymakers concerned with managing innovation. It is nonetheless a book that will interest historians of technology. The author’s concepts regarding the “functional relationship” of firms and individ­ uals to innovation could profitably be employed by scholars interested in historical patterns of innovation. Relying on data derived from case studies of a variety of major and minor innovations, von Hippel argues that the functional relation­ 334 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ships of firms and individuals to a particular innovation are the key to understanding its source. He defines such relationships by reference to the manner in which firms or individuals derive benefit from an innovation. Thus an airplane manufacturer’s innovations in aircraft design would be considered manufacturer derived, while its innova­ tions in machine tool design would be considered user derived. Although von Hippel focuses his case studies on user, manufacturer, and supplier innovations, he suggests a number of other potential categories. Von Hippel contends that innovation is “predictably distributed” among firms on the basis of the expected economic benefit to be derived from their functional relation to an innovation. Not surpris­ ingly, he finds that firms anticipating the greatest economic return are most likely to innovate, and he therefore explores the means by which firms in different industries formulate their expectations of profit. He suggests ways in which managers can more effectively distribute resources committed to innovation or even shift the source of innovation by manipulating key variables. Von Hippel demonstrates the applicability of his ideas by using material from his basic set of case studies as well as additional studies undertaken in association with colleagues or by other researchers. He successfully tests his hypothesis by predicting the functional source of innovations on the basis of different potential innovators’ expectation of innovation-derived income, and, in one case, shows how altering a key variable—product design—helped shift the source of innovation between users and manufacturers. Managers of innovation and historians alike will find the case studies presented in the text interesting, and the author’s ideas and analyses suggest subsequent studies to confirm or reject the applica­ bility of his hypothesis...