I saw an interesting post in the Putting People First blog on user-led innovation. NESTA, the UK’s Science and Innovation body, has published a paper The New Inventors on how users are transforming products and services. According to NESTA:

User-led innovation – where users play an active part in the development of new or improved products and services – is exploding: proliferating digital technologies mean that we’re all potential innovators now. New firms based on user-led innovation are being sold for hundreds of millions of dollars only a few years after being founded.

Policymakers have remained somewhat sceptical about the importance of user-led innovation. But if the UK is to harness this new wave of invention and creativity, it needs to develop world-leading policy in support of user-led innovation. This means being more aware of the impact of new legislation on user-led innovation, and establishing a forum to ensure that policymakers hear directly from these new inventors.

Sounds like the UK Government is waking up to the n=1, r=g model that C K Prahalad outlined in his book The New Age of Innovation and I discussed in a recent post.

Incidentally, I was very impressed by the content and scope of the Putting People First blog. More on this in future posts. It’s going on the Blogroll.