It has been now long since I last read Democratizing Innovation by Erick Von Hippel, for those who haven’t read his book yet Von Hippel fully states and provides examples of situation in which end users / consumers are given the ability to modify of re-design a product or service, new innovations emerge as a natural process.

Recently I had the opportunity to experience such a phenomenon within the PSP community: the PSP is a portable gaming plataform that comes with several advanced functions other than running games, such as internet browser music and video players, etc.

In the early versions of PSP’s Firmware it was possible to run unsigned code: read “homebrew” software. This means that the software didn’t need to be previously approved by Sony to be executed. With each new version Sony has patched previous security holes to prevent users to run such software.

Disregarding Sony’s efforts users have found their way to keep developing and exploiting errors on the PSP firmware to run their software.
To learn details regarding the PSP Home-brew scene please refer to Wikipedia article.

While Sony has been trying to keep up to users feature demands, most of them have been pushed by current homebrew functionality that the official software doesn’t support. By adding new features to their firmware, they try to enforce users to update, get new functionality and patch their PSP’s from running the most recent exploit to load homebrew.

Interestingly it has been the homebrew community that has been designing most of the newest functionality for the official firmware that Sony releases, every now and then. Recently this has been happening increasingly more often, due to the sustained activity in research and development from PSP hackers and developers.

A recent example is the upcoming GPS Receiver and Camera that will be available in Japan in winter 2006. Long before Sony had announced such a device, a British homebrew developer called Deniska had published his application and demonstrated how to hack a specific GPS receiver to be used with the PSP. Although Deniska had been working on this project since early 2005, probably Sony didn’t start to work on their new official GPS device for PSP until early 2006. I’m unsure if they did so, after learning of this new improvement to their product made by an final user, but at the end of the day, end users were the ones who innovated in product development and design.

Such examples are abundant in the PSP homebrew scene, and I could hardly think of a feature that the current official firmware has that homebrew developers haven’t offered months earlier, aside tons of them that the official version doesn’t have.

Now don’t get Sony wrong, their main concern for users running homebrew is that it can translate to costly sues by third parties and competitors, such as Nintendo, Sega, etc. By running homebrew and using emulators, users are able to run illegal copies of other platforms. Currently more than 32 platforms can be emulated, from gaming consoles and pocket calculators to PPC and x86 computers.

For example, using a piece of homebrew called SNESPSP_TYL, users can run illegal copies of more than 1000 SNES games. If not avoided by Sony, such actions could be considered a reason to sue.

Joe Flumerfelt recently spoke in a conference about of do’s and dont’s for Web 2.0. I think we could conclude by resuming Von Hippel with one of the new principles of 2.0 design.

Make it open, Make it hackable.

Such enduser-powered innovations are followed up by new versions or upgrades that come at a very low design cost for companies and organisations but, most importantly, users get the product which they really like and actually satisfies their needs (after all, they designed it.)

Hack on.