In his groundbreaking work Sources of Innovation, Eric von Hippel discussed from where in (and out of) the value-chain innovations came in different industries, the customer, the manufacturer, the supplier or the third-party innovator (universities, research laboratories, etc.).

The world has changed and new phenomena have become apparent. This article is a conceptual paper, discussing these new phenomena and presenting a tentative updated pheno-typology of the sources of innovation. To build these phenotypes it draws heavily on Kaulio (1998), Borrus & Zysman (1997) and Hart & Sangbae (2002).