This report presents examples of firms harnessing user-led innovation and asks whether we are doing enough to encourage these forms of innovation.

Key findings

• Unlike with ‘traditional’ innovation, user-led innovation ranges from giving feedback and support, to creating entirely new products, services and systems
• User innovators tend to be driven by their interests rather than intellectual property rights, and work within highly active communities
• Policy needs to embrace user-led innovation and better understand its implications for the UK economy
• Recommendations include establishing a User Innovation Forum and creating a pilot scheme for funding user-led innovation projects
• 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
• 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 report presents UK and international examples of firms that are harnessing user-led innovation – and firms that have emerged directly from communities of user innovators.

Most importantly, it asks the question: are we doing enough to encourage these forms of innovation – or simply to allow them to flourish?

Author

Stephen Flowers, CENTRIM, University of Brighton