User-Centric Innovation and the Shape of Things to Come

Innovation is accelerated by users taking a lead role in designing and creating the products and services they require

A recent article by Dan Woods collects the results of his research over several months interviewing ‘about a dozen people’ who have lived and worked within Amazon’s Web Services organization.

The piece appears to confirm a hypothesis I have held for some time: organizations that are based around user-centric innovation will evolve similar organizational forms and patterns of behavior. This is a direct parallel to convergent evolution:

In evolutionary biology, convergent evolution is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches. | ScienceDaily

I am using the term user-centric innovation as developed by Eric von Hippel in Democratizing Innovation and related works. [I intend to review that work in more detail in subsequent writings, here at On The Horizon.] As von Hippel wrote in a summary of that book,

When researchers say that innovation is being democratized, we mean that users of products and services-both firms and…