It used to be that producers had critical scale advantages over household sector innovators. Producers, justified by expectations of selling copies of innovations to many, were able to dedicate a team of many designers to the development of a given design. In contrast householders, with no way to identify or share their work with potentially interested others, generally had to work alone, with investments justified by usage of a design by only one or a few. Today, a household sector innovator interested in developing a particular design can post his or her interest and idea and evolving design openly on the web. Those who have similar needs can then come forward, pick up a share of the work if they like, and benefit from a complete, freely-revealed design created by many collaborators. Indeed, today it is possible for such self-formed householder design teams to greatly exceed producer teams in scale. A producer, for example, might dedicate a team of 15 employees to a particular project. A householder team can in a matter of weeks scale from a single individual to a team of tens or hundreds of expert participants – all working at their own cost, and all openly sharing their design contributions. Other research foci Eric von Hippel's overall research goal is to explore the phenomenon of user and lead user innovation deeply. He in addition seeks to connect his findings to other fields in a way that makes them easily accessible to and useable by both researchers and practitioners. With respect to explorations of the phenomena underlying user innovation, an example from von Hippel's work with colleagues is development of the concept of, and explorations of the impacts of, "sticky information" on the different types of innovations users and producers tend to develop. Specifically, research has shown that innovation users are most likely to develop functionally novel types of innovations. In sharp contrast, producers have been found most likely to develop improvements to products of already-known functions along "dimensions of merit" such as increased performance, reliability, and convenience. A explanation for this pattern put forward by von Hippel and colleagues builds upon the finding that information is often "sticky" - that is, both difficult and costly to transfer from its source of origin to innovators located at another site. It has also been found that innovators tend to innovate using what they already know. As a consequence, it