At #6 is MIT Professor Erik von Hippel on Denmark’s embrace of “user-centered innovation.”
Most countries, developing and developed
alike, view innovation as vital to their economic growth and well-being
and spend varying portions of their national budgets to support it.
That support has typically come in the form of R&D grants for
scientific researchers and R&D tax credits for manufacturers. This
focus on technology push has not attracted much controversy. But recent
research shows that the 70% to 80% of new product development that
fails does so not for lack of advanced technology but because of a
failure to understand users’ needs. The emergence of user-centered
innovation clearly shows that this near-exclusive focus on
technological advance is misplaced.
Denmark is taking this sea change in the nature of innovation to
heart. In 2005, the Danish government became the first in the world to
establish as a national priority, in the words of a government policy
statement, “strengthening user-centered innovation. Like other countries, Denmark had traditionally followed a strategy
of technology push. But, as a relatively small country with relatively
few resources, it had also been resigned to not winning in the
research-investment game. By championing a new innovation paradigm, the
Danish government is encouraging numerous methodological flowers to
bloom—from programs that improve manufacturers’ understanding of users’
needs (through ethnographic research, for example) to techniques for
identifying user-developed innovations that manufacturers can produce.
Successful approaches will be studied in Danish business schools and
shared with interested Danish firms.One such initiative is the Danish User-Centered Innovation Lab,
established in 2005. Hosted by Copenhagen Business School and staffed
by professors from both CBS and the Aarhus School of Business, the lab
is following an approach pioneered at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology a decade ago. As a government-supported partnership between
faculty experts at Danish business schools and innovative firms such as
Bang & Olufsen, LEGO, and Novo Nordisk, it comes up with new
innovation methods that are then tested in partner companies. Denmark is the first country to bring government innovation
policies into line with modern understandings of how innovation really
works. If this paradigm shift is successful, many other nations will
certainly follow.
