User-led (social) innovation?

A long, long time ago, I remember stumbling across Eric Von Hippel's "Democratizing Innovation" and having a light-bulb moment of connection with what the Global Ideas Bank is all about....user-led social innovation. The book outline is still in the drawer, but good to see others pushing this agenda. Most recently, NESTA, who are increasingly interested in this terrain, invited the erstwhile Mr Von Hippel over to discuss this very topic.

David Wilcox was there, and posted about the event (including a video interview with the man himself): "he confirmed for me that celebrating and encouraging bottom-up ways to improve products is one of the best hopes we have for the future"...and, one might add, non-product social inventions as well. Although that raises a whole different range of issues over IP etc.

NESTA themselves, in the form of Richard Halkett, posted about the event: "How do we build policy to support user-led innovation?", to which one might reasonably say "Surely the question should be 'how can we best support those users to lead innovation?' " Anyway, interesting stuff here as well: "if users are often innovators, it’s good for all of us if the state doesn’t prevent them from doing more of this in the future"...and amen to that.