Eric von Hippel

Eric von Hippel
Born	(1941-08-27) August 27, 1941 (age 82)
Alma mater	Harvard MIT Carnegie Mellon
Known for	User innovation Lead user theory
Scientific career
Fields	Management, Innovation
Institutions	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor	Dwight Baumann Charles Kriebel Milton Shaw Edward B. Roberts
Doctoral students	Dietmar Harhoff Stefan Thomke Karim Lakhani Sonali Shah Susumu Ogawa Benjamin Mako Hill

Eric von Hippel (born August 27, 1941) is an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work in developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, in 1986 he introduced the term lead user.

Eric von Hippel is the son of the material scientist and physicist Arthur Robert von Hippel, who was also a professor at MIT. His mother was Dagmar Franck von Hippel, a daughter of James Franck, a German physicist who won the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics with Gustav Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom." His great uncle is the German ophthalmologist Eugen von Hippel.

von Hippel has been awarded the EU Innovation Luminary Award (2015), the Schumpeter School Prize (2017), and the Portugal Medal of Science (2020). He is a member of the Advisory Board of Patient Innovation, a nonprofit, international, multilingual, free venue for patients and caregivers of any disease to share their innovations.