Every once in a while, I feel some people give a damn. In my previous posts about free culture, I’ve mentioned how I admire the work of people like Lawrence Lessig who defend a world where you are given freedoms and not the other way around.

Yesterday when I was checking some links, I ran across Eric Von Hippel’s new book “Democratizing Innovation“, released under a Creative Commons license. Eric Von Hippel is the director of innovation at the MIT, so he definitely knows both what he’s talking about and why he chose to release his book for free.

This being said, the book is amazing. I started reading it yesterday while waiting for my order to arrive from Amazon, and to give you a taste of what it is about and why you should be reading it, I quote its first paragraph:

When I say that innovation is being democratized, I mean that users of products and services—both firms and individual consumers—are increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centered innovation processes offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric innovation development systems that have been the mainstay of commerce for hundreds of years. Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others.

People who are into the evolution of markets, technology and innovation should get a hold of this book. Either through amazon, online, or both, as I did - remember to support the author by actually buying the book if you like it. Highly recommended.