Introduction

When considering research and public policy on the topic of innovation, there is a tendency to focus on medium and large business, with limited consideration given to small and micro business (Thomas, Miller, & Murphy, 2011, p. 6). In part, this is a hangover from the era of twentieth-century mass production and the massive scale required to be competitive at an industrial level. The capacity for the amateur inventor or ‘gentleman scientist’ to have a significant technological, scientific or commercial impact seemed to have been lost over this period. However, cracks began to show in this paradigm late in the twentieth century.

Moore's Law arose from, and helped to drive, the micro processor innovations of the late twentieth century by explaining that computer power doubles every eighteen months and is mirrored by declining cost for that computing power (Mack, 2011). The inevitable outcome has been the lowering of barriers to digital access and the expansion of the pool of people who can participate in innovation on an industrial scale. Notably, this has opened up opportunities for technological innovation and the businesses based on these innovations to start from more humble beginnings — Hewlett Packard and Google from a shed and, more recently, Facebook from a dorm room. This evolution has increased over the first decade of the twenty-first century to a point where ‘the need for corporate innovation has never been greater [but where] incumbents are outmaneuvered by new insurgents’ (Engel, 2011, p. 42). This sets the stage for some of the most disruptive innovations to come from amateurs, enthusiasts and tinkerers.

Business models like crowdsourcing and crowdfunding highlight how, in the digital realm, both the software and, progressively, the hardware are being developed by people who would traditionally be considered consumers. A business like Kickstarter demonstrates this changing paradigm. Through the provision of the right tools, Kickstarter proves that a community can generate ideas, make choices of resource allocation and bring a product to market — with the added benefit of being certain that a market exists (Gobble, 2012). This approach is possible because affordable and extensive access to communication channels, cheap computing power and shared knowledge have combined to enable a culture of collaboration (Hippel, 2005; Muhdi & Boutellier, 2011).