Charles talks about how innovation is a creative collaboration, that it occurs because of the users and consumers rather than the professionals in business. He states that passionate amateurs using new tools and with a desire for success create new products that professional companies can’t.
It’s interesting to think of the role users and consumers play in the development of products. It’s not what we typically think of when we imagine innovators. The first example he brings up is the mountain bike. It wasn’t created by a major bike company or a basement genius, it came from a group of kids who weren’t happy with racing bikes. Mountain bikes are now the dominant category of bikes and they were created by a collaboration of consumers and users.
Next he takes a look at the creative process and why big companies aren’t well suited for innovation. Large organizations are built to steadily improve based upon past successes. They favor incremental improvements over high risk projects that could be the next big idea, but also have the risk of failure.
I really like his example of rap music as a big success story that never would have started if not for a group of dedicated artists that pushed for their spot in mainstream music. The idea of rap was impossible to sell to major record labels at the genre’s beginnings, but continued due to the groups love for it.
Another important point was the fact that competition with some of the Fortune 500 companies has to come from an open source. Nobody will fund you to compete with established companies so success must come from a strong user group. These people however don’t usually seek success. He points to bloggers as an example. Bloggers don’t want to be journalists; they want to have their opinions heard. This is an important point to define any innovators, as their main goal is always a passion for what they do.
“Why these open models will continue to work is because they multiply our productive resources and turn users into producers and consumers into designers”