The Rise of the Amateur Professional

Why Radical Innovation Is Coming From Users, Not From R&D Organizations.

Another in the series of my favorite TED talks, on the innovation series Charles Leadbeater is discussing innovation and where does it happen, why organizations are becoming increasingly less important as the source of innovation and why some companies are so keen to fight user driven innovation.

It is an interesting talk and worth the 20 minutes to listen to it completely.

In the talk, Leadbeater brings up interesting examples, for instance, how the mountain bikes came about and became a multi-billion dollar business. He also talks about how Internet is changing the way people organize together to accumulate ideas and collaborate on them.

How do we organize ourselves without organizations? That's now possible. You don't need an organization to be organized, to achieve large and complex tasks like innovating new software programs.

This is a huge challenge to the way we think creativity comes about.

Leadbeater criticizes traditional innovation done in R&D labs, universities, etc. where select individuals build ideas and products towards a passive user who either accepts or rejects it. He argues that companies that want to survive will need to open up and reverse the innovation pipeline to enable users to become creators and designers. Radical innovation is increasingly coming from the users, and it's a cumulative, collaborative process, rather than one big stroke of genius from an individual or small group of individuals working behind closed doors. Traditional organizational structure with its inability to accept new radical ideas will lose out in this game. Organizations that are unable to manage innovation in new ways will only be capable of incremental, evolutionary changes due to their tendency to enforce past successes. In the process they will be blind-sighted by an idea that fundamentally changes the market-place.

Big corporations have an in-built tendency to reinforce past success. They've got so much sunk in it, that it is very difficult for them to spot emerging new markets.

Leadbeater also thinks that more and more innovation will in the future come from what he calls amateur professional, people who tinker with ideas for the love of it but do it with great sense of pride and desire for quality.

[Amateur professionals] do it for the love of it but want to do it to a very high standard. They work at their leisure. They take their leisure very seriously.

Why are people interested in this? At work they don't feel very expressed. They don't feel as if they are doing something that really matters to them. So they pick up these kinds of activities.

This has huge organizational implications for very large areas of life.