Eric von Hippel | |
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| Born | August 27, 1941 |
| Alma mater | Harvard MIT Carnegie Mellon |
| Known for | User innovation Lead user theory |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Management, Innovation |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral advisor | Dwight Baumann Charles Kriebel Milton Shaw Edward B. Roberts |
| Doctoral students | Dietmar Harhoff Stefan Thomke Karim Lakhani Sonali Shah Susumu Ogawa Benjamin Mako Hill |
Eric von Hippel (born August 27, 1941) is an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work in developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In 1986 he coined the term lead user to describe this phenomenon.
Eric von Hippel is the son of the Arthur Robert von Hippel, a material scientist and physicist who was also a professor at MIT. His mother was Dagmar Franck von Hippel, a daughter of James Franck, a German physicist who won the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics with Gustav Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom." His great-uncle is the German ophthalmologist Eugen von Hippel.
von Hippel has been awarded the EU Innovation Luminary Award (2015), the Schumpeter School Prize (2017), and the Portugal Medal of Science (2020). He is a member of the Advisory Board of Patient Innovation, a nonprofit, international, multilingual, free venue for patients and caregivers of any disease to share their innovations.