This book is a substantial collection of the latest research papers on users, communities, and open innovation literally hot off the MIT Press. It is also an acknowledgement and tribute to the scholarship and leadership in the field of innovation by Eric von Hippel, Professor of Technological Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Revolutionizing innovation consists of 25 chapters organized into six sections. Section 1 presents the fundamentals of user innovation. Section 2 covers the community innovation perspective, and Section 3 addresses the thorny legal aspects of user and community innovation. User-innovators in new roles are explored in Section 4, and user interactions with firms are examined in Section 5. The book concludes in Section 6 with a discussion of how to move from theory to practice by utilizing experiments, innovation toolkits, and crowdfunding.

The quality of scholarship in this book is breathtaking--it is stuffed with keen insights from cutting-edge researchers--as is the quality of the book itself--meticulously edited and crafted. I found Stefan Thomke’s research in chapter 22 on innovators’ tools especially enlightening. He portrays how user innovation reconfigures the information flows and experimentation boundaries between customers and suppliers.

This book is essential reading for scholars, graduate students, entrepreneurs, and innovators interested in the latest theories and thinking about users, communities, and open innovation. It belongs in your library of innovation giants, alongside the works of von Hippel himself [1], Chesbrough [2], and Christensen [3]. Readers interested in the topic of leading innovation should read Isaacson’s biography about the postmodern giant of innovation Steve Jobs [4], and subsequent work about the giants of the digital revolution innovating the Internet [5].