Pedro Oliveira is Professor MSO at Copenhagen Business School; Gulbenkian Chair Professor for the Impact Economy and Adjunct Full Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics (NovaSBE). He is the Founder and President of Patient Innovation (www.patient-innovation.com); Academic Fellow at the Cornell Institute for Healthy Futures at Cornell University; co-founder of PPL Crowdfunding; member of the Environment and Sustainability Board of Energias de Portugal – EDP and Principal Investigator of several research grants.
 
Eric von Hippel is an American economist and a Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work in developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In order to describe this phenomenon, in 1986 he introduced the term lead user. Hippel's work has applications in business strategy and free/open source software (FOSS), and he is one of the most highly cited social scientists writing on FOSS.