Six books on amateurization

Innovation and design have traditionally been concieved as the job of professional designers and engineers. That seems to be changing. At least this is the impression one gets from recent landmark books on innovation, management, and design.

Howard Rheingold, the author of Smart Mobs (2002), argues that interesting socio-technical breakthroughs are not anymore coming from the established industries, but instead from the fringes, start-ups, and associations of amateurs.

Henry Chesbrough, the author of Open Innovation (2003), as well as Eric von Hippel, the author of Democratizing Innovation (2005), add that companies should redesign their innovation processes and start seeking out potential business ideas from various kinds of (lead) user communities and start-ups, which often have more freedom to explore new things.

Charles Leadbeater, who launched the concept of professional amateurs in his book The Pro-Am Revolution (2002), believes that passionate, networked amateurs who work to professional standards will have a great impact in the way our economy and business will be structured in the future.

John Thackara, the author of In the Bubble (2005), suggests that designers should evolve from being the individual authors of products to facilitators of change among large groups of people.

Most recently, in his new book Fab (2005) Neil Gershenfield anticipates that the next big thing after personal computing will be personal fabrication. When things will be composable and decomposable on the atom level, we'll be able to send each other objects by e-mail and print them out in our living room.

This short book review (which certainly did not do justice to the authors) shows that questions regarding the role of user innovation, DIY, pro-am, hacking, and crafting are topical in our economy and society.

Something big seems to be going on, but we don't quite yet know what it is and how it's going to impact the businesses and our lives.

Comments

[Veli Ville]

I think the Long Tail is relevant in this one, also. Ie. the change will only be partial, not total, because it is an evolutionary change. Total change is a top-down effort which involves change management.

Thus it will effect the lifes of some of us, but not everyone, and the businesses of us, but not everyone's. Long live the Long Tail! :)