Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5BqC8795x5w
Systems of use is the new lens Eric von Hippel brings to user innovation. The MIT Sloan professor coined the term lead users in 1986, and his books from The Sources of Innovation to Free Innovation changed where researchers look for new ideas. In this episode he asks us to stop studying the knife and start studying the whole kitchen.
Look at everything a person combines to get a job done, their habits included. Seen that way, users hold advantages that manufacturers struggle to match.
User innovators and the hidden ratio
Traditional economics assumed producers do the innovating. Eric’s paper quotes Joseph Schumpeter directly. “It is … the producer who as a rule initiates economic change, and consumers are educated by him if necessary” (The Theory of Economic Development, 1934, p. 65). Eric had built things for himself, so the story felt incomplete. Producer innovators create something to sell it. User innovators create something to use it.
When his team traced the history of functionally novel products, users kept appearing first. Riders took road bikes down mountains long before any company sold a mountain bike. Once three riders became three thousand, manufacturers arrived and advertised the idea as their own. Eric sees no evil intent in this. Marketing departments simply have no reason to say Joey invented it.
Surveys later put a number on what stays hidden. In the UK, for every person a company hired to develop consumer products, a hundred consumers were innovating for themselves.
Why companies still miss it
Finding user innovations has become far easier. Eric’s team scans the web for them and counts downloads as a sign an idea has legs. They spotted kiteboarders fitting small electric motors under their boards, and a couple of years later the boards were all over the Charles River.
Yet companies still stumble. Athletes had been mixing their own energy gels for long-distance cycling, and one food company showed real interest. It came back to call the idea a flop. Its researchers had surveyed shoppers in supermarkets who had never ridden a long race.
What systems of use reveal
Aidan offered two images. Sam Arbesman, author of The Half-Life of Facts, once described complexity as life buoys tied together with ropes and thrown off a pier. Pull one and the whole tangle moves. Add Russian dolls nesting inside each other and you get close to a system of use.
The mountain bike shows how one plays out in sport. Manufacturers voided warranties when road bikes broke on descents, so riders built their own klunkers with motorcycle brakes. As they learned to jump, they needed suspension. An orthopaedic surgeon who rode built one to protect his back. Manufacturers followed and made suspension more reliable.
Cardiac surgery shows the same pattern under far higher stakes. John Heysham Gibbon wanted to operate on a stopped heart. Producers told him to come back once he had developed the operations and found a valve supply. So Gibbon and his team built the entire system, heart-lung machine included. Different companies make the scalpel and the machine. Only the surgeon and his team can coordinate change across both.
Four advantages users hold in a system of use
Eric’s paper sets out four reasons users out-innovate producers inside a system of use.
A market of one. Gravel racers in multi-thousand-kilometre races each build a different setup, because one rides well at night while another has strong legs. A producer must sell to many people, so its products satisfice.
Sticky need information. A rider may sense he needs different handlebars without ever putting it into words a producer could use. The user holds the high-fidelity version of the need.
Design freedom. A racket maker can give you a bigger head and still cannot change your serve. Producers sell parts that plug into the old system. A racer chasing lower drag can shroud the bike, change position, wear a streamlined helmet and shave his legs.
Speed and cost. A user builds a prototype and starts using it the same day. A manufacturer has to produce in volume, prove safety and pass regulation before anyone buys.
Temporary innovation and the MacGyver principle
Many innovations in a system of use are behaviours, and manufacturers don’t produce behaviour. Mountain bikers pass jumping technique peer to peer with no company involved.
Some fixes last seconds. When Eric’s friend’s young daughters dropped the frosting, he slid a clean file folder along the floor to scoop it back into the tub. Eric calls this bricolage. Like MacGyver with his safety pin, the need had vanished before any manufacturer could respond. Corey Rollins, a longtime listener, sits at the other end. He designed the N-Twin pillow, a patent-pending ergonomic support system, after one too many nights of stacking pillows. It solves a nightly need, and Eric points out he will also adjust how he sleeps to make it work.
Eric expects AI to speed users up further, leaving manufacturers to supply toolkits that persist across many innovations. Producer innovation, he argues, is becoming the special case.
Read Eric’s books and papers free under Creative Commons at evhippel.mit.edu, and his new paper, ‘Systems of use’: A lens to more deeply study user innovation, in Research Policy (2026).
Eric’s earlier conversations on The Innovation Show
- Eric von Hippel on The Innovation Show, earlier episode 1
- Eric von Hippel on The Innovation Show, earlier episode 2
- Eric von Hippel on The Innovation Show, earlier episode 3
About the Guest
Eric von Hippel is Professor of Innovation Management at MIT Sloan School of Management. He coined the term lead users and is the author of The Sources of Innovation, Democratizing Innovation and Free Innovation. His honours include four honorary doctorates, the EU Innovation Luminary Award and the Portuguese National Medal of Science. Find his work at MIT Sloan.
About the Host
Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more about Aidan.
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world’s leading businesses. Discover thought leadership from many Innovation Show guests at the Kyndryl Institute.
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Frequently asked questions
What is a system of use in innovation?
A system of use, in Eric von Hippel’s research, is everything a person combines to get a job done. It includes products, software and the user’s own behaviour. A surgical team’s system includes the heart-lung machine, the surgeon’s technique and the team’s routine.
What is user innovation?
User innovation happens when people create something in order to use it themselves. Producer innovation happens when firms create something to sell. Von Hippel’s research shows users often develop functionally novel products such as the mountain bike first, with manufacturers following once a market appears.
Why do users have an advantage over manufacturers in a system of use?
Von Hippel identifies four advantages. Users serve a market of one, hold sticky need information, can change several parts of their system at once, and can put an innovation into use quickly and cheaply. Producers control only the components they sell.
Who invented the heart-lung machine?
Surgeon John Heysham Gibbon developed the heart-lung machine. Von Hippel explains that producers declined to build it until Gibbon had also developed the operations and a valve supply, so Gibbon and his team built the whole system themselves.
What are lead users?
Lead users are people who care enough about a need to build advanced solutions before the market offers them. Eric von Hippel coined the term in 1986. Their solutions often open the way to products the rest of us later buy.
Who is a keynote speaker on innovation and change in Ireland?
Aidan McCullen is a Dublin-based keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change. He is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, host of The Innovation Show and author of Undisruptable. He works with organisations across Ireland and internationally on transformation and innovation.