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User-centric Innovation: A Key Policy Agenda for the Knowledge Economy

This leading-edge research will fill a clear gap in the understanding of UK innovation capability — and enable development of more realistic, more comprehensive models of user innovation.

This growth of User-centric Innovation has potentially large implications for our understanding of innovation and key policy areas including industrial structures, business models, the operation of markets and Intellectual Property. This study will examine four key areas of user-centric activity that will provide important guidance for policy responses in this area: recorded music production and distribution, music software, computer games, and social networking. The scale, scope and nature of user-centric innovation will be explored in each area, the links between areas will be examined, and illustrative case studies within each area developed.

The results of this work will assist in developing new avenues for policy development and will enable the crafting of policy frameworks which overcome the limitations of existing approaches to User-centric Innovation.

Background

We see a dramatic shift towards more open, democratised, forms of innovation that are driven by users, not firms. The growth of such User-centric Innovation has been most visible in a series of creative digital industries like music, the media and computer games, but is now growing rapidly in entirely novel areas like social networking and video sharing. User-centric Innovation has had a significant direct impact on important UK industries (e.g. music), and its influence is rippling out across many other sectors. In key areas of the UK economy the innovation agenda is now being set by users, not firms, yet our understanding of this important source of innovation is weak and UK policy remains silent on this issue.

By failing to develop a more informed and nuanced policy response to User-centric Innovation the UK runs the risk of chilling an important source of creativity and innovation.