View source for Pro-Ams as a Force for Social and Commercial Innovation



=Discussion=

Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller:

'''1.'''

"Amateurs have a long track record of innovation, especially in
emerging fields which are too young for there to be an organised and
professional body of knowledge or too marginal to warrant the
attention of companies or universities.

Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, a history of the inventions that
paved the way for the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, is a story of a group of Pro-Am inventors,
scientists and manufacturers – Mathew Boulton, Josiah Wedgewood,
Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, Joseph Priestley and others. Most were
non-conformists and freethinkers, who pursued scientific questions
out of curiosity. That tradition of Pro-Am experimentation is alive
and well today among open source and hacker communities on the
internet or the Homebrew Computer Club, which spawned Steve
Jobs’s and Steve Wozniak’s ideas for a personal computer. Another
example of how Pro-Ams lead innovation to create entirely new
industries is windsurfing.

...


'''2.'''

'''Pro-Ams play three distinct roles in innovation.'''

'''First, Pro-Ams can be disruptive innovators.''' Disruptive innovation
changes the way an industry operates by creating new ways of doing
business, often by making products and services much cheaper or by
creating entirely new products. Disruptive innovation often starts in
marginal, experimental markets rather than mainstream mass
markets. Embryonic markets are often too small to sustain traditional
approaches to R & D. That is where Pro-Ams come in. Dedicated
amateurs pursue new ideas even when it appears there is no money to
be made. That is why they are a persistent source for disruptive
innovations, such as Rap music.


'''Second, Pro-Ams lead innovation in use.''' The more technologically
radical the innovation the more difficult it is to say in advance what
the innovation is for. It may be impossible for the ‘authors’ of the
innovation to predict exactly how it will be used. It is down to the
consumers to work out what a new technology is really for. That
requires innovation in use or the co-creation of value between
consumers and producers. Mastering a computer game used to be an
individualistic activity undertaken by boys in the dark of their
bedrooms. Now it’s a mass team sport that depends on intense
collaboration. By 2000, most strategy-based computer games had
built-in tools to allow players to create and customise the content and
action. Knowledge about the game is constantly developing among a
sprawling army of Pro-Am players, linked by websites and chat
rooms. A game’s official release is the moment when the initiative
passes from the in-house developers to the community of Pro-Am
users. There is a sound commercial logic behind this encouragement
of Pro-Am innovation. Open, mass innovation allows many
innovations to continue in parallel once a game has been released
among a distributed community. If a game sells one million copies
and just one per cent of the players are Pro-Am developers, that
creates an R & D team of 10,000 people working on further
developments. Their contributions make the game more interesting
and that in turn extends the game’s life, constantly refreshing it.

'''Third, Pro-Ams are vital to service innovation.''' All services are
delivered to a script, which directs the parts played by the actors
involved. Most service innovation comes from producers and users
simultaneously adopting a new script, playing out new and
complementary roles in the story. That explains why the ‘script’ for
ordering a meal in a formal restaurant – replete with waiters, tips,
menus – is so different from the ‘script’ for ordering in a self-service
restaurant, when the consumer does much of the basic labour
involved. Pro-Am consumers play a critically important role in
devising these new scripts, because they are the leading, more
informed and assertive consumers.

Harnessing Pro-Am service innovators will be vital to the future of
public services, especially in health, social care and education. As an
example take diabetes. Surveys show that most people prefer to have
health issues dealt with at home rather than having to visit a hospital
or surgery. Surveys of diabetes sufferers also show that those who are
more able to self-manage their condition are less likely to suffer
health crises than those with little know-how who rely on specialist
help. One of the most effective ways to improve the lives of diabetes
sufferers is to equip them better to self-manage their condition, to
write their own scripts on how they want their condition treated.
The more Pro-Am skills there are distributed across an economy
the greater the innovation and labour market flexibility."


'''3.'''

"Pro-Ams play an increasingly important role in business innovation.

This challenges the traditional assumptions of public policy that
innovation starts in R & D labs, where backroom boys and boffins
come up with bright ideas that they pass down a pipeline to waiting
consumers. Traditional innovation policies subsidise R & D and
accelerate the transmission of ideas down the pipeline and into the
market. Pro-Ams are helping to turn this closed model on its head. In
mobile phones, media, computer games and software, ideas are
flowing back up the pipeline from avid users to the technology
producers. Pro-Ams should play a much larger role in innovation
policy. Lead users should play a larger role in foresight exercises to
chart the future course of innovation, and policies to deregulate
markets should also open up spaces for Pro-Am innovations. Pro-Am
communities are the new R & D labs of the digital economy."
(http://www.demos.co.uk/files/proamrevolutionfinal.pdf?)

=More Information=

The report, the [[Pro-Am Revolution]]


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[[Category:Collaborative Economy]]

[[Category:Design]]

[[Category:Manufacturing]]