User driven innovation and Karim Lakhani

Recently I poo-pooed the "dawn of emergent collaboration" (a phenomenon older than civilization) and said I was much more excited about the resurgence of "user-driven technical invention."

Today I discovered the UserInnovation web community led by Karim Lakhani, who recently graduated from MIT and joined the Harvard Business School faculty. The welcome page of UserInnovation states:

"Empirical research is finding that users rather than manufacturers are the actual developers of many or most new products and services – and that they are a major locus of innovative activity in the economy. This finding opens up new questions and avenues for exploration in fields ranging from economics to management of technology to organizational behaviour to marketing research. Examples are patterns in innovation by users, characteristics of innovating users, design of a user-centered innovation process, economics of a distributed innovation process that includes users as innovators, and social welfare implications of innovations by users.

"We have set up this website to provide a convenient repository for papers on topics related to innovation by users. Our goal is to establish a community in which research information related to the topic of user innovation can be freely exchanged."

Thanks to Bob Wolf for introducing me to the work of Karim Lakhani.

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