Participatory innovation in SMEs

Abstract

Several case studies in literature and handbooks about participatory design (PD) suggest that the use of emerging methods to generate user information is common practice. However, these authors address practices in academia or in leading companies and not necessarily the practice of the majority of product development companies. The mentioned companies like for example Microsoft (Sanders, 2004) are in a privileged position, having the possibilities to spend time, manpower and budget on extensive user studies and explore participatory design projects. But how does the Small-to-Medium sized Enterprise (SME) fare in this respect?

Full text at ACM