This is not by an means a conventional business book on innovation - the reader has to be prepared to cope with a fair amount of academic speak, and it is arguable how much practical guidance is found within these pages.

However, the book should not be dismissed if you are interested in the mechanisms of innovation, and particularly how they spread out from a supplier to their customers, or a provider to their users.

We are used to the world of innovation being secretive. If you have a big, new commercial idea, you keep it to yourself. But this book describes a much more open, contributory form of innovation, where a lot of the input comes from the end users rather than the original designer. Arguably, this approach to innovation is the child of the internet, and particularly the World Wide Web with its anarchistic order and blurring between user and content provider.

In particular, von Hippel focuses on user-centred innovation, suggested that the forefront of both product and service developments can be seen not with tightly enclosed companies, but with "lead users" who show the way for developments in their fields.

We have seen this sort of user input most commonly in markets like software - look, for example, how a product like Skype has been driven by community input - but von Hippel argues that the model can even be brought into hard manufacturing, and can be reflected in tax breaks and research subsidies.