An Innovation to Diffuse Innovation

Eric Von Hippel likes to share his work on Innovation. In this interview, he explains why.

I’m trying to diffuse my work and ideas, much the way MIT does with OpenCourseWare. Society is already paying me for my work via my research funding.

So what does the author do? Takes the two books he has written on Innovation and makes them available as free downloads. I have seen other similar moves from authors like Mark Pilgrim (Dive Into Python) and Bruce Eckel (several programming  books).

In this interview Eric says that this experiment proved that making books freely available on Internet, in fact, improved the sales.

Here are links to download Eric’s books – Democratizing Innovation and The Sources of  Innovation.

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