Prof. Eric von Hippel has written one of my favorite books: Democratizing Innovation. Prof. von Hippel teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and runs the Innovation Lab there. Our class of Harvard Law School students focused on Internet, Law and Politics have created a wiki page of questions for Prof. von Hippel in advance of his visit here.

We at Harvard have amazing neighbors at MIT, with whom we do not do enough collaboratively. I’m hugely grateful to Prof. von Hippel for coming through the rain to guest-lecture at HLS and help bridge the unnatural gap between 02138 and 02139.

The challenge for this class today is to find the connect points between von Hippel’s findings from the business world and Benkler’s findings in The Wealth of Networks and to draw conclusions from this intersection about the core themes of our course.