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Nurturing user-producer interaction
Innovation flows in a low income mobile phone market
Christopher [email protected]
Institute for Development Policy and Management,University of Manchester
Low income markets & innovation
HOW DO WE CONSIDER THE LINK BETWEEN THESE TWO PROCESSES?
Kenya’s mobile phone sectorMobile Money
Mobile Handsets
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Innovation systems
1) Systems of interactive learning: DUI (Lundvall)
2) Integration of innovation and diffusion (Fleck)
Mobile Money Mobile Handsets
Mobile money: Guided interaction
Mobile money: Systemic learning
• Intermediaries learning the rules of the innovation system
• Elements of control limits scope for adaptation – intermediaries follow the rules
Regulatory requirements, consistant service
× Reduces ‘user/intermediary innovation’
Handsets: Marketised Interaction
Handsets: Systemic learning
• Local adaptation, but lack of reverse flows. • Distant firms simply do not see adaptation• Horizontal diffusion: imitation, staff etc
Simple to administer for lead firmsX Localised ideas rarely amplified by lead
firms, undesirable innovations
User-producer interaction
“An important aspect of the innovative process is the exchange of disembodied information between the producer and the user via information channels” (Lundvall 1985:7)
Embedded in practices/objects around innovation. Local adaptation
Demand-side intermediaries as the active and adaptive actor
Operational elements of supply chain
Lundvall and risks
Guided networks:
“asymmetrical power relationships between users and producers resulting in biased technical change” (Lundvall 1992 p.54)
Better learning where power is more
equal
e.g. Buffering actors, Reduction of
elements of power and control
Lundvall and risks
Marketised structures:
“…producers would have difficulties in observing new user needs”
“…users would lack information on the characteristics of the new products”
(Lundvall 1992: 50)
Develop more consistant channels
between user and producer
e.g. Bridging actors, Increasing
operational involvement as strategy
Conclusions
• Nurturing user-producer interactions – Active intermediaries as key for ‘user’
innovation– Operational links as a channel of interactive
learning– Objects and elements as guiders of innovation– ‘Distance’