Tag Archives: UserInnovation

Seminar on user innovation

I am currently attending the seminar on user innovation at the Technical University Munich. The atmosphere is very much informal and relaxed, I enjoy that. Eric von Hippel is undoubtably the star of this community: having pursued the topic since the mid 70s (as far as I know), he also deserves this. Looking forward to the rest of the seminar… (now back to listening to the presentations :-))

By the way, Stefan Haefligers presentation was gradually moved forward, so that he is now second after the opening speech (and Karim Lakhanis presentation).

Oxford English Dictionary

The creation of the Exford English Dictionary is nicely described in “The Professor and the Madman” by Simon Winchester.

The book’s cover describes it as “A tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.” It’s an interesting story about how an obviously insane American Army officer ended up being perhaps the greatest single contributor to the OED. This might be one of the first examples of distributed User Innovation or crowdsourcing.