The concepts of open innovation, crowd wisdom, mass creativity, mash up user-generated content…) lets call it participatory innovation (PI). This will infuriate more or less anyone engaged with innovation, as really these terms are too disparate to be legitimately combined into one category. Participatory Innovation ideas are increasingly gaining traction in society and in commentary around innovation. Indeed there is a healthy debate around innovation and society that was not nearly as active a few years ago.

There have been a few articles in the press recently contrasting participatory innovation with Apple. The argument is that Apple is a (shinny, easy to control) dinosaur breaking the rules of Silicon Valley and beyond in shunning any PI variants and remaining resolutely closed. I’m going to let others evangelise for apple (this time) but I think this apparent dichotomy has some interesting implications for the design profession (and professional innovators as a more general and helpful description).

I have been developing, researching and promoting PI for close to 15 years in one form or another, and for a long time my conclusions were telling me that ultimately design was destined to become a universal set of skills available to everyone (like English or History) with a very small professional constituency outside education. In many respects if you believe that emancipating people is a good thing this is an inescapable position.

While I still think this will happen I am new convinced that there will be a role for professional designers in the future beyond helping everyone to be as creative and productive as they can be. This realisation is grounded in the innovation literature that promotes participatory innovation (von Hippel, Chesbrough, Christiansen, Ledbetter…). Here and elsewhere there is ample evidence of specialists in a field untrained in design or innovation being intensely creative (as I think most of us are). Here we see examples of radical invention (e.g. Heart Lung machine, created by a team of surgeons or kite surfing by enthusiasts) and there are many examples of incremental innovation but in terms of radical or disruptive innovation the case for PI is weak.

I think the reasons for this are underexplored but fundamentally this comes down to the trial and error nature of creative invention and the advantage of situational awareness and experience for PI (e.g. fanatical downhill bikers coming up with mountain bikes). Innovation (rather than a brilliant inventive idea) is hard, especially as increasingly this is reliant on a system that includes intertwined hard, soft and really soft (human) components for success. The case for trial and error in idea generation is well made by neurologists of creativity like Goel and more accessible by writers such as Lawson and Dorst. The implications of this are that to become skilled at innovation takes practice, time and lots of mistakes.

PI tends to be a one off action, crucially taking advantage of the situational awareness and life experiences that professional innovators do not have. This makes serial innovation very difficult as moving to a new challenge often means relinquishing the advantage of deep personal experience.

This is where professional innovators have the advantage, they have many opportunities to learn how to innovate across challenges and contexts so that while they may be disadvantages in some contexts they also have an implicit advantage that their innovation abilities can be more easily developed. The same applies for conceptual leaps that mark disruptive innovation, the mental agility developed through the practice of making many conceptual leaps are more likely to be available for someone while being trained in innovation than someone developing more specialist skills (this is an argument for universal innovation training).

The overall result of this is that PI is growing quickly, providing a richer ecology of innovation and increasing the total sum of innovative activity through improved communication and opportunities. This will be marked by proportionately less design activity as we know it (but more activity in education) but there will still be a role for the excellent, ground breaking design. In this respect the activities of Apple, in developing excellent, highly refined products fits well into this model.

Addendum

My current research is looking to find a way to help everyone access this ‘excellence’ through the creation of processes and systems in a practical, non-hierarchal manner not restricted by supply and demand so perhaps we (designers) are doomed after all.