Democratizing Innovation

Fortune has a wonderful article, The Amazing Rise of the Do-It-Yourself Economy.  Call them citizen engineers.

a number of factors are coming together to empower amateurs in a way never before possible, blurring the lines between those who make and those who take. .....they’re simply finding a way—in this mass-produced, Wal-Mart world—to take power back, prove that they can make the products that they want to consume, have fun doing so, and, just maybe, make a few dollars.
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Bloggers, those do-it-yourself journalists, showed big media that the barriers to entry (like owning a printing press, say) didn’t much matter. Podcasters took radio into their own hands, creating audio shows and putting them online. Amateur music producers, using software that was once the province only of major labels, invented mash-ups: combining songs into totally new ones, then giving them away or selling them. And with the advent of services like Google AdSense, which let people easily put advertising on their sites, these tinkerers could—while not vaulting themselves into Bill Gates territory—at least break even.

Blogs are serving as an R&D center & focus group as well as identifying potential customers.

HT Instapundit.