According to [Eric Von Hippel
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology], in the past firms have
mostly resisted customer innovation or not known what to do with it.
American farmers were lobbying manufacturers to make cars with
detachable back seats as early as 1909. It took Detroit more than a
decade to "invent" the pick-up truck. Even now, carmakers respond to
customer modifications such as performance-exhaust systems by voiding
the warranty. Within three weeks of launching "Mindstorms", a
build-it-yourself robot development system, in 1997, Lego was facing
around 1,000 hackers who had downloaded its operating system, vastly
improved it, and posted their work freely online. After a long stunned
silence, Lego appears to have accepted the merits of this community's
work: programs written in hacker language may now be uploaded to the
Mindstorms website, for example.
Tags:
opensource,
innovation
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