Section 21.4. Conclusion

21.4. Conclusion

Community-based innovation has contributed to technological and industrial advances in many fields. Users are at the center of this model: they discover new needs and desires, cooperate with other users within innovation communities, and sometimes even commercialize their innovations. The community-based innovation model is pervasive across time and context, contributing to the development of physical and virtual products and shaping products, industries, and scientific disciplines. Yet, for a number of reasons, communities of users often go unnoticed by firms, policymakers, and society at large. Some firms have, however, recognized the contributions of users and their communities and actively work alongside them, providing consumers with novel and improved products and services and creating a revenue stream that contributes to the firms' profits. As intellectual property policy evolves, policymakers ought to consider the impact of proposed policy changes on the ability of users to innovate. Preserving the ability of users to collectively tinker and modify is necessary for continued innovation of the type that has provided us with many of the products and tools, and a substantial amount of the knowledge and know-how that we rely upon and enjoy on a daily basis. In short, the principle that Richard Stallman succinctly defined in the GNU General Public Licensethat people must be free to use, modify, and distributeapplies to creative and innovative activity in many fields, not just software.^[11]

^[11] Sincere thanks to Carliss Baldwin, Glenn, Hoether. Mark Stone, and Rosemarie Ziedonis for their feedback and enthusiasm.