Based on Jon Udell’s excellent post, I spent the weekend getting reacquainted with work of Eric von Hippel, the researcher who pioneered the study of user-driven innovation.
What’s interesting about von Hippel is that his research hits on the common themes of the open education movement, but does so in a slightly different key.
Briefly, there are a number of intersecting debates about MOOCs. There is what Reich frames as the Dewey/Thorndike debate about what learning is. There is the centralized/de-centralized debate about what the web does best. There is the debate about about whether MOOCs are disruptive or innovative or neither, and the discussion over how much ability to remix teachers need to make classroom learning work well (answer, probably, is quite a bit).
But people on both sides of the debates are often driven by a larger question that we are not naming directly enough: “What are the sources of innovation?”
User Innovation
This is the question that von Hippel has been investigating for over thirty years now. And if we see innovation not as something that has happened, but as something we want to continue to happen, this may be the most important question of all.