Episode 51: Lead user Innovation with Frank Piller

Product Quest Podcast

Today we welcome Prof. Dr. Frank Piller of the RWTH Aachen University. Dr. Piller is considered one of the leading German experts for innovation management, open innovation, customer co-creation and product individualization. His research has received numerous awards, like the PDMA Co-Creation Award or the nomination for the “Innovating Innovation” award from Harvard Business Review and McKinsey. He previously worked at the MIT Sloan School of Management before becoming a professor in Aachen where he is now the Head of Chair of the Institute for Technology & Innovation Management. Frank habilitated in 2004 on Open Innovation and User Innovation at the TUM Business School in Munich, where he headed the research group “Customer Driven Value Creation”. I got to know Frank and his work in more detail by going through the Micro Master Program at the RWTH on “Managing Technology and Innovation: How to deal with disruptive change” which I can only recommend. All this screams for having him on the podcast and not lastly because in that course he mentions his appreciation of the Jobs-to-be-done approach which is something of a household philosophy here at the Product Quest Podcast.

Here are the additional links that we talked about:

Lead User Method:

https://evhippel.mit.edu/teaching/

Lead user input and cocreation for innovation:

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/reducing-the-risks-of-new-product-development/

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1975523

Paper on AI and innovation and the double diamond model:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jpim.12656 (free download)

Self Driving Chemical Labs

https://www.matter.toronto.edu/basic-content-page/ai-for-discovery-and-self-driving-labs

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-022-00231-0

The Nature article with the material science experiment I described:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1335-8 (Summary: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01978-x)

edX: Free Innovation classes

https://www.edx.org/micromasters/rwthx-managing-technology-and-innovation-how-to-deal-with-disruptive-change

Executive Program on Using AI for Innovation (taught entirely in VR)

https://thegemba.com/course/leading-intelligent-engineering-vr

Innovation master program at RWTH:

https://www.business-school.rwth-aachen.de/en/programs/m-sc-management-engineering-in-technology-innovation-marketing-entrepreneurship/