User-Led Innovation beyond the Application Layer

London.
Jo Pierson and An Jacobs are up next at Transforming Audiences; their focus is on user innovation in creating new sociotechnical systems. Technology is layered, ranging from the application layer through presentation, session, transport, network, and data link layers to the physical layer; user innovation takes place to date mainly at the top of this layering, not in the lower levels. How can this be changed, and what tools are required to achieve it? How can the user be placed in control of the creative destruction which innovation can bring about - and indeed, what kind of innovation are we talking about?

From one perspective, of course, all users innovate, but such innovation ranges from consumptive innovation by everyday users through innovation by productive users (what I would call produsers) to innovation by producers themselves. The distribution of participation tends to follow a power law, where 1% of users are highly active in high-end innovation, 9% are somewhat active, and 90% are hardly active at all; this holds across many cases and forms of innovation. One obvious question which emerges from this is how to enable the transmission of innovative ideas across these different groups of users - how can ideas generated by everyday users be communicated to lead users, for example, and vice versa?

Co-design interaction is needed between the different types of users, then; this pro/am dimension goes beyond a focus on technology, of course, and professionals in one area may be amateurs in others, and vice versa. Amateurs and pro-ams may well profit from the availability of DIY toolkits supporting them. This needs to be further explore.

Technorati : Pro-Am, Transforming Audiences 2009, innovation, lead users, participation, produsage
Del.icio.us : Pro-Am, Transforming Audiences 2009, innovation, lead users, participation, produsage