R&D staff members often proactively pursue unofficial innovation projects, driven by the desire to effect internal change, meet a personal need, or explore a passion. Many of these innovations remain invisible but could offer broader benefits to the organization. Improving processes for bottom-up innovation can help companies take full advantage of this phenomenon.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. These days, 3-D printing is much in the news. Also known as "additive manufacturing"or "rapid prototyping,"3-D printing is the printing of solid, physical 3-D objects. Unlike machining processes, which are subtractive in nature, 3-D printing systems join together raw materials to form an object. Some see 3-D printing and related technologies as having transformative implications. "Just as the Web democratized innovation in bits, a new class of 'Äòrapid prototyping'technologies, from 3-D printers to laser cutters, is democratizing innovation in atoms,"Wired magazine's longtime editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, stated in his new book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. "A new digital revolution is coming, this time in fabrication,"MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld wrote in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs. But in addition to 3-D printing's technological implications, recent evolutions in 3-D printing offer important management lessons for executives about the changing face of technological innovation -and what that means for businesses. In this article, the authors examine the rapid emergence of a movement called open-source 3-D printing and how it fits into a general trend toward open-source innovation by collaborative online communities. They then discuss how existing companies can respond to -and sometimes benefit from -open-source innovation if it occurs in their industry.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. It has long been assumed that companies develop new products for consumers, while consumers are passive recipients -buying and consuming what producers create. However, this paradigm is fundamentally flawed, because consumers themselves are a major source of product innovations. The authors have framed a new innovation paradigm, in which consumers and users play a central and active role in developing products on their own. In this article, they summarize key findings from studies on consumer product innovation conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. The authors describe three phases in the new innovation paradigm. Initially, markets for products and services with novel functionality are both small and uncertain, with consumers pioneering really new products (for example, the skateboard) for themselves. In the second phase, other consumers become interested in the new products. In the third phase, producer companies decide if the information on the design and function of the new product, and the projected market, are consistent with their risk profiles. The implications are significant for both consumers and producers, the authors note. Consumer innovators should realize that they play important roles in developing novel products and services. Businesses, for their part, need to think about how they can reorganize their product development systems to take advantage of prototypes developed by users. By focusing on product concepts that consumers have already prototyped and tested, companies can save money and improve their success ratios.