Participatory Innovation

An increasing number of corporations engage with users in co-innovation of products and services. But there are a number of competing perspectives on how best to integrate these understandings into existing corporate innovation development processes. This paper maps out three of the dominant approaches, compares them in terms of goals, methods and basic philosophy, and shows how they may beneficially enrich one another. We will present an industrial innovation case that has been instrumental to the development of what we have termed "Participatory Innovation". Based on this, we will list the challenges such an approach sets to innovation management, and discuss research directions of what we see as fundamental to the development of the field of user-driven innovation.