Users of products and services – both firms and individual consumers – are
increasingly able to innovate for themselves. User-centred innovation pro-
cesses offer great advantages over the manufacturer-centric development
systems that have been the mainstay of commerce over hundreds of years.
Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than rely
on manufacturers to act as their (very often imperfect) agents. Moreover, users
do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit
from innovations developed and freely shared by others.
(von Hippel 2005: 1)Companies are increasingly likely to ‘free reveal’ in order to increase incentives
to innovate, giving away ownership rights in order to obtain other benefits.
Though the example often given is open source programming, the democratizing
of innovation goes far beyond this particular practice (von Hippel 2005), by
recognizing the enthusiasms and pleasures of consumers’ involvements with
numerous commodities and entering into a relation with those involvements, thus
producing ‘experience innovation’ (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 200 4 ) through
shifting the boundary between private and collective.
But it is important to note that not all or even most consumer communities are
active innovators. Rather, they are likely to be involved in something much closer
to what Barry (2000) and Lazzarato (2002a), following Tarde, call ‘invention’,
as a means of distinguishing the practice of iterative improvements resulting
from particular modes of interaction from innovation. Invention may multiply
the possibilities for technical change but is rather a form of imitative change that
opens up the possibilities for further action: ‘the amplification of slight transfor-
mations in the design, styling, promotion and delivery of a particular product
(or service) has the potential consequence of non-linear returns as it is exploited
in the multiple relations between products’ (Lury 200 4 : 60). In invention, mere
use^19 is superseded by pleasure in the activity itself, of which the commodity is an
active partner. When a commodity produces a sufficiently compelling experience
environment, consumer communitieswill evolve beyond a company’s control,
thus directly co-creating value and providing the firm with a new terrain of profit
- generalized outsourcing – if it is nimble enough to adapt to the new conditions.
These communities gather round particular obsessions, which cover an enormous
spectrum although many of the prototypes were in music, fashion and information
technology. Sometimes these communities resemble mere interest groups,
sometimes groups of fickle fans, sometimes hobbyists, and sometimes cults. What
is clear is that their existence is not predictable, in part because they are engaged
in activities which find their own fulfilment in themselves, without necessarily
objectifying these activities into ‘finished’ products or into objects which survive
their performance (Virno 200 4 ). The quality of interactivity therefore becomes
a major part of the commodity, not only because that interactivity assumes the
presence of others but also because a number of products have become more
complex and require more consumer investment, in part playing to this social
tendency.^20
Re-inventing invention 41