Hot off my notebad, here’s my version of what transpired at Charles Leadbeater’s seminar at QUT today. Just the main points on the role of users in innovation and the emerging category of the ProAm which Leadbeater thinks is a growing force in the cultural economy. His approach has significant similarities to the standard cultural studies line on active consumption, but he is a big picture guy, interested in far wider social, cultural and economic implications.

Users as Innovators
In closed innovation models, consumption is the end point of a process of innovation that originates in the mind of a (special, creative) author. Consumers are passive except in exercising their right to choose among options, and to accept or reject the innovations present in those options.

In open innovation, consumption and use is an essential part of the innovation process, not the end point of it. In fact, the purpose of an invention or innovation is defined not by the inventor, but by its use in networked communities.

Services should be understood, not as predetermined routines, but as scripts, with users of the services as co-influential actors who rewrite the scripts as much as they follow them.

The more radical the innovation, the greater uncertainty about its purpose, function and use, and therefore the great the role of users in establishing its significance. (examples: the world wide web; mobile phones).

Disruptive innovation begins at the margins, driven by experimental consumers and enabled by small companies who need to do something other than sell more of the same to the same markets. These marginal and experimental markets are made up of critical audiences who operate in subcultural economies of cultural value.

The ProAm Economy (much like the notion of the prosumer I was bandying about a while back).
ProAms are amateurs who are as knowledgeable, skilled, emotionally invested and resourced in particular pursuits as professionals, but who don’t derive their main income from these amateur pursuits. [I think that sociologists call this category “serious leisure” – unpaid work that is done for reasons of self-actualisation and lifelong learning, as well as for status]

This emerging category derives from the contemporary importance of knowledge-based consumption as a major source of cultural capital, and the greater importance of cultural capital as against class or geography within developed, networked societies.

The work/leisure divide is far too simplistic, but neither is it meaningless – a better approach is to consider gradations of intensity of the relationship between subjectivity, work and leisure pursuits. Charles proposed a continuum from professional through post-, pre-, and semi-professional all the way to dabbler at the weakest end.

I think we might complicate this further in looking at particular pursuits where the professional-amateur divide has been more or less blurred in modernity already ( photography, music) and those which have only really been achievable by professionals (full-scale chemistry and physics) or that have never been professions (stamp collecting).

Questions dealt with some of the issues around the unrewarded nature of user innovation, and the underground nature of much user participation which might nevertheless help to drive commercial innovation forward.

All in all, pretty convincing arguments, and so bang on my thesis topic its quite unbelievable. I’d better hurry up before everyone gets on the amateur bandwagon…