From the Bookshelf: Democratizing Innovation

One book that has really influenced my understanding of how open education affects the production of course materials is MIT Professor Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation. Published in 2005, this book doesn’t address open education or educational resources directly, but rather it discusses how companies are taking advantage of lead user innovations in a range of fields including, among other things, the manufacture of kite surfing equipment.

von Hipple’s book has a lot to say indirectly about how educational materials may or may not be suitable for reuse. One basic idea von Hippel puts forth is that the wider an audience a particular product is designed for, the less satisfied on average any one audience member is likely to be with the product. This is one challenge that designers of learning objects must grapple with.

He also describes how innovators often are less interested in the details of a particular product’s implementation than in the approach taken to create the product. The details usually differ enough that the innovator cannot directly borrow the product, but can fashion a similar product from scratch using a similar approach. This makes me wonder whether localization is less a process of adapting existing materials to local conditions and more a process of using openly published models to fashion new materials from scratch to address local needs.

Like Wealth of Networks, Democratizing Innovation is available for free as a PDF under a Creative Commons license.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Bookshelf, Learning objects, Localization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.